


The Ripple Effects

by minkmix



Category: Dark Angel, Supernatural
Genre: Alec POV, gen - Freeform, ripple effects, spn/da crossover, with a bang
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-01-31 18:18:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 31,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18596824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minkmix/pseuds/minkmix
Summary: Alec POV. After the events of 'Not a Whimper' Bobby heads bacto South Dakota. To much dismay.This verse is pretty large. But the chapters are not.And it goes in this order:'With a Bang' - https://archiveofourown.org/works/15259845/chapters/35395707and is followed by a few other arcs of this verse:After Shocks (16 chapters) - https://archiveofourown.org/works/16973790/chapters/39893430Not a Whimper (19 chapters) - https://archiveofourown.org/works/17001399/chapters/39967239The Ripple Effect (12 chapters) - https://archiveofourown.org/works/18596824/chapters/44087722Minor Tremors (11 Chapters). - https://archiveofourown.org/works/18815989/chapters/44647327These are allcompleted.





	1. Chapter 1

Alec knew he wasn’t the only person around here suffering the ill effects of the month’s events.

After the insomnia week went by and he became less and less mired in his own bullshit, he began to notice that the house had gotten pretty quiet.

With the exception of this morning.

Alec woke up alone in his dad’s bed to the sound of loud voices right outside on the front porch. There was an argument going on about Bobby packing up his car to leave. From the shouting Alec quickly gathered that Sam and Dean had been trying for some years now to get the guy to move up here with them, especially before another winter hit South Dakota. But old Bobby didn’t sound too keen on leaving behind his salvage yard and Rottweilers to come live in a guest room no matter how cozy it was.

“Alec!” Dean called from the driveway. “Get a quart of oil from out back would ya?”

Alec grabbed a few extra while he was at it, thinking of Bobby's ancient transmission and the long drive home. He couldn’t blame the old hunter for not wanting to stick around. The man didn’t seem like the grandpa type that wanted to retire on a porch and whittle shit all the live long day. Bobby seemed like the kind of guy that was going to keep hunting and straying around where he wanted until one day he just didn’t call home anymore.

And then he’d just be gone.

Anyway, before Bobby hit the road, everyone was all hugs and smiles again. Bobby even motioned Alec aside for a walk that Alec had been secretly dreading to hope for.

“You gotta minute, son?”

Alec glanced self-consciously back at Sam and Dean, grateful that they both were suddenly pretending to be preoccupied with the air in the sagging tires.

Following the old man down the dirt path that wound around the church, Alec gnawed at the inside of his lip. He liked Bobby and he really wanted Bobby to like him too. Especially after how they met and everything. He knew all this crap with Ben wasn’t really his fault, but he already felt like his mere existence was a colossal pain in the ass to anyone unfortunate enough to get within arm's reach. But the hunter didn’t seem to mind what Alec was despite knowing more details about his DNA than even Alec had ever known. It made him feel strangely at ease around him, like a doctor who knew enough about a disease not to be afraid of the patient.

“Sure is a nice day, ain’t it?” Bobby asked.

“I like it a little hotter,” Alec hadn’t gotten dressed but boxer shorts felt like too much already with the sun slanting through the trees. “By about 7 more degrees.”

“Not 8 or 6, huh?”

“Fahrenheit,” Alec added. “Not Celsius.”

“I remember hearing your mama was real fond of summer.”

Alec had never heard anyone mention anything like that about his mother. He suddenly felt happy about his mild inclination to strong heat. Like it was a secret he shared with her and no one knew but him. Well, except the person who just told him of course.

“Are you coming back soon?” Alec asked. “You should come back soon. There’s a big Anniversary party here in a few weeks with the whole town and uh, well I don’t know if you want to be here for that thing but--”

“I’ll be back this way before you know it.”

“Are we going to have Christmas and all that other stuff?” Alec felt better asking Bobby than his dad. “If-If we have those holiday things you should come back for that.”

“Sometimes I bring up a tree from my woods.”

It took a second before Alec figured out what that meant, but before he could ask why they‘d bother with a real life tree when science had given the world plastic, they had reached their destination. The stream behind the church was practically a river these days after spring, all sorts of wild flowers growing up around its banks and the sun glittering off it as it rolled under the bridge of the road.

The old hunter wiped a bandanna at the sweat on his neck and looked up and down the scatter of the small stone beach.

“Now I want you to take care of yourself,” Bobby said. “And I want you to watch out for your dad and uncle.”

“I will.” Alec answered automatically.

“You been through some times, but you’re a tough kid. Never seen tougher.”

Alec didn’t know what to say so he just kept his eyes down on the ground like he’d been taught to do when a superior was speaking. But something flashed into his lowered field of vision, dangling bright in the sunlight. Looking up, he raised his hands to hold the perfectly round green stone hanging from a thin leather cord.

“It was something I was gonna give to your daddy a long time ago, but now I think you should have it. In fact, about ten years ago I put it aside hopin‘ I‘d see you one day to hand it over.”

Slipping it on over his head, Alec immediately liked how it felt on his skin, smooth like a marble and polished to show all the gold flecks inside the swirl of its grain. “Thanks. It’ll match my eyes.”

“It’ll do more than that,“ Bobby said. “It good for angels.”

Alec made a face as he rolled it between his fingers. “Does that mean its lucky?”

“It means there’s less of a chance of you pissin’ ‘em off.”

Alec shrugged. Angels. He could buy that story like he could anything else around here. Dropping the stone on his chest, he patted it to show he understood the seriousness of it all.

“And Alec, one more thing…”

“Yes, sir?”

Bobby dug into his back pocket and pulled out a small case. The cracked leather was well cared for, oiled and polished to a nice worn shine. Alec flipped it open and found an old style and utterly obsolete military compass inside. Slightly disappointed, he turned the device over and saw initials etched in a scrawling script on the flat green paint.

J.W.

Alec’s eyes widened. “B-Bobby, I can't--”

“Sure you can. Your daddy and uncle know all about it, so there’s nothin’ to worry about. It’s something that you can use, something that helped lots of people out when they got themselves lost.”

Alec tipped the compass to watch the needle spin. “Do you think--Do you think he would have liked me?”

Bobby let out a laugh. “I think John would have liked ya a lot. Not sure you woulda liked him too much tho.”

Alec smiled and wished he had a pocket to put the compass in. But he decided he wouldn’t mind the minor humiliation of his family seeing it in his hand. He realized he was actually pretty proud. “I’m sorry,” he quickly remembered to say.

“For what?”

“I don’t have anything to give to you.”

Bobby laughed a little again. “It’s just fine, son. That’s not how this one works.“ With a big sigh, the old hunter took a look at the hill they just walked down. “Oh and Alec, do me a favor would ya?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t mention how I was gonna give that necklace to your dad okay? You know how kids get.”

“Okay.”

Following behind him, Alec considered what a guy like Bobby would like for Christmas. His gaze fell on the crumble of the lofted shed that sat way behind the house. If the man ever did want to retire, there was plenty of space out there to keep to yourself and some dogs. All it needed was some plumbing and an internet connection.

Alec listened to the hunter swear softly at the rise of the hot sun.

And maybe an air conditioner.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Alec POV. Alec's not the only one around here with PTSD._

After Bobby left Alec realized he was starting to feel a whole lot better.

He made a trip into town to fill up the empty fridge. Cleaned the various cars. When the chores ran out he started walking the meandering roads that surrounded the house for miles. All of it took his mind off something besides the murmur of the television and the sight of the same four walls.

But as he started to get out more, he noticed his father seemed to be doing a lot of the opposite.

Walking into the quiet house, he already knew exactly where to find Sam. “Hello?” Alec had started to feel like an intruder whenever he cracked the door to the dark bedroom. “You still sleepin’?”

Rolling over on the bed, Sam didn’t open his eyes. “I’m fine,” he said softly. “I’m just tired.”

Alec thought he was looking a little on the pale side.

Although his father had been technically deceased for about a week, Alec didn’t understand exactly what the current problem was. Granted the whole near-death experience thing didn’t leave a person feeling all that fantastic. Alec should know, he’d been puking up all sorts of interesting stuff for a while and he still wasn‘t exactly back to what he’d call normal. Glancing uncomfortably at the closed blinds, he wondered if his dad had gotten a look at the newly leveled cornfields yet.

“Are you thirsty?” Alec asked.

“No.”

“Hungry?”

“No.”

Alec had been getting the weird feeling that his father had been maybe holding back his exhaustion until now. Like Sam had been waiting for Alec to come around again before he let himself finally crash.

“Okay,” Alec backed out of the room. “Be right back.”

He got a plastic pitcher and filled it with ice like the medics used to do for him when he was laid up in the infirmary. Setting it down on the floor, he watched Sam curl tighter into a ball and gingerly slide his hands over his forehead.

“Are you depressed?” Alec guessed. “I read that people who are depressed sleep a lot and don’t eat anything.”

“I’m not depressed.”

“Are you sure? Because I‘ve also seen a few infomercials in my time and--”

“Yeah.”

Alec decided to finally test the waters so to speak. He hadn‘t been brave enough to try to listen in on his father‘s mind unless Sam had been sleeping and all that got him was a lot of dreams that made no sense. “This might hurt a little,” he apologized in advance. “Sorry.”

“What migh- _angh_...“

Alec pushed his thoughts outwards until they found Sam’s with as much grace as an elbow to the gut. And then he was suddenly inside and sharing the clutter of a headache pounding like a hot anvil in his skull. Wincing at the weight of it, Alec got a glimpse through Sam’s eyes, the pain so bad that he could barely see anything past a few feet. It was disturbing to realize that his father’s body ached all over from injuries that Alec hadn’t even known about. Down the side of his left thigh, the chest, the right hand...

“A-Alec, please. Not now…”

An unexpected image of Ben flashed over everything else. The clone was shoving the black cloth of the cassock into Sam’s hands. The image stuttered again to Ben leaning in close, the clone’s eyes burning bright and his voice low and urgent in his father’s ear--

Sam cut the connection off hard, the force of the removal sending Alec backwards a step into the door frame.

“I said I’m fine, Alec.”

It was privacy, he vaguely understood, that was keeping Sam secluded in this room. Back in Manticore all your damage was listed and addressed. Your unit’s physicality was made your business and responsibility.

“I still don’t remember anything,” Alec tried a different tactic. “After we had that fight I started running and … I don’t remember anything after but waking up in here and puking on Dean.”

“Good,” Sam said. “That’s good.”

“I guess,” Alec said. “What do you remember?”

Sam always paused for a moment when Alec asked him that. His shoulders tensing before he gave a quick tight smile and a shake of his head. “I don’t remember anything after leaving the church.”

Alec felt a flare of impatient frustration. “Are you lying to me?”

“No,” Sam said quickly. “I’m not.”

There was another flash of Ben. It was so vivid and startling that Alec made a small sound of surprise. Ben was hidden in a ring of colored flames that dripped down from the church ceiling like jewels of a chandelier. Ben was smiling and happy but he was fading away, he was vanishing right into thin air…

“All I remember is the church,” Sam repeated. “And then I was here. Like I blinked or something.”

Alec took in the messy bed that was usually made every day by dawn. Military corners and all that crap. “I’ll get you some dinner.”

“I’m not hungry--”

“We’ve got lots of peanut butter.”

Sam sighed but he didn’t say anything else.

Heading to the kitchen, Alec was just fine with that. His dad could sigh all he wanted as long as he choked down a sandwich. But it turned out he was wrong about the peanut butter. Rattling a knife in the jar he found, he considered how nutritional a few inches of grape jelly between two slices of bread would be…

Alec was startled by a loud on the thud on the window directly in front of his face.

Blinking in confusion at the bright splatter of neon paint on the glass, Alec realized whatever it was would have struck him right between the eyes if the window hadn’t been closed. Peering around the splotch, he saw Dean standing out in the backyard with a large and magnificent looking weapon Alec couldn’t immediately identify.

He had to shove at the new window pane a few times before he could get it open.

“W-What is that thing?” Alec asked in wonder.

“Paintball gun.”

Alec ducked this time when another barrage exploded over his head and splattered festively on the wall behind him.

“That’s better,” Dean slung the gigantic electropneumatic rifle over his shoulder. “Don’t want ya getting soft out here in the country.”

“You got another one of those?”

“Yeah, you wanna get out of here before Sam starts makin’ it rain?”

He wasn’t sure if his uncle was kidding about the rain or not, but shooting shit up right now sounded awesome. Tossing the jar of jam into the sink, Alec decided dinner time could wait for when someone felt like turning on a stove. Stepping outside under the churn of the gray clouds he followed Dean’s easy smile.

But something made him pause.

Glancing back once at the house, he realized he could feel his father falling back into an uneasy sleep. Alec gently and slowly reached out again until he could see the dream starting to fill Sam’s head, concentrating hard not to startle or jolt him back into wakefulness. The sputter and blast of the church flames were already starting to roar behind Sam’s eyes like the fire in an a glowing furnace. Alec spread his thoughts thin to softly smother the heat and noise, until there was nothing there but the peaceful quiet of nothing at all.

His own heart began to calm as his father’s fell back into an even steady rhythm.

“What are you smiling about?” Dean asked.

Hefting the extra rifle, Alec shrugged.

Sometimes it felt good to get something right.

Even if it was just a shot in the dark.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Alec POV. Celebrating a holiday is hard work._

There were a lot of things to be learned from the glittering wonderland that was television.

Alec had figured out more about the world during an afternoon of reality show marathons than he had by reading any books or listening to instruction on psychology. At least he felt like he’d picked up a few things he could actually use in the field anyway. Like how to sauté rather then simmer. Don’t wear navy blue with black. Never trust a blond housemate that quotes the bible and Britney Spears at the same time.

Clicking between stations he paused when he found a nice chunk of commercials. He liked those almost as much as the designated entertainment.

_**Don’t forget this weekend! __**_ __

__“Sure won’t,” Alec answered. “Comes right after Friday.”_ _

___**Only three shopping days left before IT’S TOO LATE.** _ _ _

__Alec glanced uncomfortably out the window. The sun was out and cold weather was months upon months away. Looking at his watch he confirmed that the date was still smack in the middle of a humid June._ _

___**What are YOU going to do this weekend to show your family that you CARE?**_ _ _

__A procession of charcoal grills, golf bags and power tools flashed enticingly across the monitor._ _

__Alec frowned._ _

___**Don’t miss this special time that only comes once a year!** _ _ _

__He sat up in rapt attention._ _

___**YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO WASTE ANOTHER SECOND.** _ _ _

__“What… why?”_ _

__**Because it’s… FATHER’S DAY.** _ _

__“Crap,” Alec slumped back on the sofa. “I totally have one of those.”_ _

___**What are you waiting for?!?** _ _ _

__Alec had no fucking idea._ _

__The laptop was sitting unattended on the kitchen table and was better than the finest and freakiest malls in Hong Kong. With a small feeling of betrayal, he clicked off the tube and quickly headed for the internet._ _

__He had some serious shopping to do._ _

__

__

__

__

__The big box that arrived on the doorstep came a day late but Alec reasoned it was still Sunday somewhere else on the planet. And it arrived early enough in the morning so he could catch Sam and Dean both sitting at the table yawning over cereal._ _

__Their spoons dripped milk on the table when Alec tossed the bowls into the sink._ _

__“It’s a holiday,” Alec announced. “At least it was yesterday.”_ _

__Sam was still blinking groggily around for his breakfast._ _

__“Holiday?” Dean ate what was left on his spoon. “What holiday?”_ _

__Alec realized too late that he probably should have gotten some wrapping paper or something. He settled for just handing Sam a knife to slice open the cardboard. It was kind of exciting standing around for the unveiling. The anticipation was like a pleasant nausea._ _

__“This… this is really nice, Alec.”_ _

__Not only did Alec know the gift was nice, but he was for once completely confident of its relevancy. That website he’d found had said it was a really thoughtful thing that people gave other people all the time. All you had to do was supply a photograph and click on how fast you wanted the items shipped._ _

__“It’s got your picture on it and everything,” Sam studied the enormous coffee mug and brushed away some packing foam. “A really … interesting picture.”_ _

__“You like it?” Alec had actually been a little worried about that part. “It’s from back in Seattle. From about a year ago.”_ _

__“Yeah, it’s great but uh…” Sam said. “Can I ask you a question?”_ _

__“Shoot.”_ _

__“Where’s your shirt?”_ _

__“And what the hell is ‘Manty Cora‘?” Dean asked._ _

__“MONTY Cora,” Alec corrected. “I was briefly employed by an underground fighting ring and they took a few promo pictures and--”_ _

__“Nice shorts,” Dean said. “Very sparkly.”_ _

__“Yeah,” Alec smiled. “Oh! I almost forgot…” Digging in the box he yanked out a large T-shirt with the same photo blown up on its front and back. He tossed it to his uncle. “That’s for you.”_ _

__“What the f--”_ _

__“I got one for me too,” Alec pulled out another one. “Buy twenty-five and get another one free. And a couple of mouse pads, some key chains and a throw pillow.”_ _

__“I’m sorry, did he just say… did you just say twenty-five?” Sam was clearing his throat a lot. “Twenty-five of that shirt? Are in that box? Twenty-five of the same--”_ _

__“Don’t worry, yours is in here too!” Alec said. “And I got another couple bucks off by getting this color. It’s called Canary Yellow.”_ _

__There was an absolute and utter silence that Alec understood came from stunned appreciation._ _

__“W-What holiday was this again?” Dean asked._ _

__Alec felt his smile grow as he went down the back porch steps two at a time. That helpful website had also suggested mowing the lawn and doing some yard work. Slightly discouraged by the overgrown mess of the grass, he figured he could knock it out in an hour and then get the hell out of here._ _

__It was the least he could do._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey TV Child look into my eyes  
> Here by intervention I want your attention
> 
> Promotion Boy in a suit and tie  
> He wants you to use it  
> You're too shot to loose it
> 
> It's pumpin down the cable  
> Like never seen before  
> A cola manufacturer is sponsoring the war
> 
> Here comes the news with love from me to you
> 
> -duran duran


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Dean POV. Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder for EVERYBODY. (even the cat)_

Dean didn't like to advertise, but lately he hadn't been feeling that great.

For a while he'd figured he was just more tired than usual.

And it wasn’t that good worn out feeling at the end of a long month either. He was yawning all day and having fucked up dreams all night. But pausing at Sam’s closed door, he felt a certain amount of pride for his family’s mercenary ability for self neglect. He personally liked to skip the middle man completely by buying meds from a cash only hack who didn’t bother asking about symptoms. Illegally prescribed narcotics and a contingent of bed rest, and Dean Winchester just needed an alarm clock to notify him when it was time to get over it.

Hadn’t quite worked out that well this round though.

He was about to tap a knuckle on the door, but instead of knocking he went ahead and opened it. Experience had taught him the difference between real sleep and when his brother wanted to disappear for a while. Looked like these days Sammy was doing a lot of both. Shutting the door quietly, Dean thought that grabbing some down time in the middle of the day maybe wasn’t such a bad idea.

But his own bedroom wasn’t as unoccupied as Sam’s.

“Give me some Yiddish,” Alec didn’t look up from his book. “I need all forms of the verbs ‘to run’, ‘to expect’ and ‘to devise‘.”

“No idea.”

“But you have all this stuff in your room written in the Hebrew alphabet.”

“I’m in it for the pictures.”

"How about an easy one?" Alec tried. "To be? To have? To want?"

Shoving a stack of books off the bed, Dean wedged himself between the other piles and tried to get comfortable. “We got a perfectly good floor,” he said into the pillow. “And it’s great for storage.”

He felt Alec give a shrug beside him, the slight movement making the old mattress creak on its springs. The kid had started sleeping up in the attic again, but he was living downstairs. A warm breeze wafted in through the open window, pushing the curtains across Dean’s face and making him open his eyes. He was just in time to see the cat get ready to fling itself across the gap of the sill to the bed, launching with all paws outstretched like one of those freaky squirrels that could fly.

Dean shut his eyes again so he wouldn’t have to witness the tragic wipe out. But to his surprise, the dumb bastard made it. Just barely.

“Damn it,” Alec muttered as a heap of books hit the floor. “I just bookmarked all those.”

Lifting his arm, Dean rolled over a little so the tiny animal could burrow its way into his T-shirt via sleeve opening. It was itchy as all hell, but if he didn’t grant access he got a ruthless pair of claws instead.

“Haven’t you read all this shit already?” Dean asked. “Thrice?”

“So much stuff gets lost because its on paper,” Alec sighed in frustration. “It makes me wonder how much crap vanished after the Pulse because it wasn’t saved anywhere. I think I‘m gonna start scanning some of these. You know, just in case.”

Dean rubbed at his eyes and adjusted the alien-like pouch of cat now bulging on his chest. “Don’t worry about it so much. Think about all those guys with the temples down in Mexico.”

“Yeah, all they left behind was some piles of rock and a ball game.”

“But they left something.”

It was hard not to think about everything he wanted.

Dean did his best to keep it low like an unwanted radio station in the car. All of his noise was nudged up just high enough so that only he could hear it. There was a flare of worry that thinking about not thinking would somehow call more attention to himself. He glanced over at Alec but the kid was still busy flipping through page after crumbling page.

For some reason the oblivious look on his face made Dean’s jaw clench.

“Now the Romans,” Alec said absently. “They left behind something.”

“Toilets and dog fighting?

“Philosophy. Government. Morality.”

Dean was under the impression every culture came with those whether or not they wore a toga.

“Look Dean, all I’m just saying is that when you aren’t the conquer, your knowledge gets obliterated by the guys who win. And if everyone keeps insisting on printing…books… all we’ll have after the next world war is something to keep the fires lit.”

“Something bothering you?” Dean guessed.

“I’m being serious.”

“If that’s what you wanna call it.”

“I know you think about it sometimes too,” Alec opened another book. “Everybody does.”

Dean had an uneasy moment when he realized he didn’t know if Alec actually knew that for a fact or not. With a sickening lurch in his gut, he wondered exactly how little it would take for any of his family to pick through whenever they wanted in his head. The idea made him feel reckless, willing to shout just to see if anyone could hear it.

He allowed random memories to surface. Scents. Sounds.

What immediately came to mind was a little strange.

The first beheaded body he’d ever seen had been lying in a green field filled with sunflowers. In his memory the bobbing black eyes of the flowers had seemed more grotesque than the mutilation itself. With no effort at all, he conjured a night years later when he‘d first had to dismantle a human body himself. His thoughts wandered backwards to the more happy memory of the curve of bare shoulders in the glow of a bonfire on a dark beach. The glitter of wrecks on the highway. A sunset smoldering out over in the desert. He could think up a million other more mediocre and hideous things to fill the spaces in between.

But it was easier just to feel angry instead, the raw and simple emotion coming in loud and clear.

“Dean?“ Alec suddenly asked. “Where’d you get that?”

He was braced for a question, but the kid was looking down in distraction at Dean’s arm. Feeling the arc of the scar that wound down his bicep, he had to think for a second before he could recall when and how it’d happened.

“Knife.”

“What about that one?”

Dean checked his other arm. The marks whiter as the summer darkened his skin. “Knife.”

“How about the one on your neck?”

“Uh, knife.”

“Geeze.”

“I got a few bullet holes too,” Dean assured him. “And some bite marks--” He stopped talking when Alec’s hand unexpectedly slid over his and held it. He could feel a charge, something passing under his skin and running through them both like an electric current. Looked like Alec had picked up on something after all.

“Stop,” Dean went cold. “Let me go.”

Alec’s brow slowly creased in confusion.

“You’re mad at Sam.”

“I-I said let go of me,” Dean yanked at his hand again, fighting the anger that had shifted into nauseating panic. “Right now.”

“Yeah,” Alec said it soft and sad, like he was answering a question Dean hadn‘t asked. “I’m mad at him too.”

Sitting up awkwardly with his trapped hand between them, Dean heard books tumbling to the floor and his heart thudding in his ears. He could remember perfectly what had happened the last time he had been backed up against this wall. He remembered his brother wouldn’t let him go either. And Sam was telling him everything was going to be fine. Sam was talking about trust while he gently held Dean’s face and started ripping pieces of his mind away--

The painful grip pressing into Dean’s palm was gone.

“I don’t think Sam ever wanted us to feel like this,” Alec said. “At least I know that makes me feel better about… you know, feeling bad.”

“Alec-”

“Can I show you something?”

Dean tensed, looking at the open door and wishing he wasn’t so relieved that there was an open window right behind him too.

“Please don‘t?” Alec’s voice abruptly sounded timid. “Please don’t be scared of me.”

The honest fear in the kid’s eyes washed his anger away like a shock of clean and icy water. “I’m not,” Dean said. “I’m not, Alec. I’m just, I’m--”

Alec held out his hand for Dean to take if he wanted.

“What is it?” Dean felt stupid for asking, but he knew there was something unknown waiting in the touch.

“It’s easier. Easier than saying it I guess.”

Alec’s hand was shaking in his.

Dean could almost feel his own pupils dilate as it soaked in, Alec’s own grief large and gray, a weight that made him squeeze his eyes shut as they got hot and burned tears down his face. He could see all the rage hanging like a flimsy front to the simple childlike indignity of being hurt. Crushed. Disillusioned. Let down. Dean nodded once before he put Alec’s hand back down on the bed.

“I’m glad you told me that,” Alec said. “I felt kinda weird sometimes. You know, like I wasn’t allowed to be pissed off or something.”

Dean didn’t bother to remind him that he hadn’t said a thing. But the kid had an interesting point about the whole being glad part. Because truth be told, he was breathing a little easier already. “We should go into town,” he watched the cat roll on the floor and gnaw on an Aramaic dictionary. “I think the library has an old scanner. I bet you could fix it up and start savin’ these books before certain doom befalls the human race.”

“That sounds tedious,” Alec said hopefully. “And time consuming.”

“It sure does.”

“Can I drive?”

“No.”

He found the keys on the dresser and a pistol in the top drawer. It was time to get up and start moving again.

Maybe even take the scenic route.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Alec POV. A cursed music box turns everyone (except Alec) into a little kid. Yes, this a de-aging fic._
> 
>  
> 
> Chaper 5/1 of 5/5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I said I needed some time to get out my weird ya-yas? This fic right here is one of them. This genre is oddly as appealing to me as genderswap although I don't know the technical name for it in fan-fic land. Age-Swap? Age-Degeneration?   
> And yes, of course it all happens by way of A Curse. It's just the way it works. (plus I'm too lazy to think of any other reason why this nonsensical bullshit would happen to anyone.) XD  
> -mink

It sure was sunny out.

Not in here though. Alec coughed with the dust.

“I appreciate you coming up here, Bobby,” Sam said. “Honestly with all this storage I wouldn’t have even to known where to start.”

Alec looked sideways at the stack of boxes that were usually sitting in the corners instead of all over the floor. His family’s idea of neat and tidy made his head spin, but over time he had started to just ignore the clutter of crap everywhere and anywhere.

Slow breathing exercises helped too.

“You should keep some of this stuff locked up,” Bobby said. “Or just get rid of it.”

“Get rid of it?” Dean laughed. “That would mean actually knowing what we owned.”

Alec felt his headache double at the words. He really shouldn’t have sat down to witness this pitiful attempt at organization but he couldn’t help himself. Watching the disorder spread and the chaos exponentially grow was like a good horror movie. He couldn't turn away even if he wanted to.

“The Father from Saint Michael’s is coming in early tomorrow,” Sam moved another box. “This place doesn‘t have to be clean just normal. The last thing I need is for the guy to wander around in here and find a few bibles written backwards in pig blood.”

Alec’s heart started pounding when Dean dumped an entire bag filled with rosary beads all over the floor.

“Yeah, I like this place,” Dean said. “It’d be nice not to get run outta town by an angry mob with torches.”

“Here we go.”

Everyone paused at the lowered seriousness in Bobby’s voice. Alec sat up in begrudging interest as the old man lifted the small wooden container out from behind a stack of yellowed folders. It looked like a music box, all carved and delicate, but its front was padlocked shut.

“What’s that?” Sam asked.

“I think I saw this back when your daddy was gettin' things from Eastern Europe,” Bobby smiled like he had found a diamond. “Bunch of stuff that had been sitting around behind soviet lines until the break up.”

“The lock is rusted,” Dean gingerly touched the latch. “What’s in it?”

“Not sure,” Bobby said. “Looks like a hex though, something really old school.”

Alec was ready to leave. They could sit around with their freaky tag sale and reminisce about murderous paranormal junk until the sun went down for all he cared. He could come back when they were gone and go sick with the Lemon Scented Pledge and a mop. He’d take all these dusty boxes and burn them in the backyard and dance around it until it was all-

That’s when it happened.

The box in Bobby’s hands stuttered with a dim light, like a weak and failing light bulb. And then the room suddenly seemed slightly darker than it had been moment before. Alec looked around with a yawn, wondering what had happened when all the other lamps to be working fine. That’s when he realized the room was also slightly less crowded than it had been.

Or at least a lot shorter.

“What the--” Alec blinked at the little kid who had been standing where his father had been a few moments earlier. There was another little boy off to his right and an even younger child sitting on the floor and staring down at that music box in his chubby fists.

The infant with the box in his lap suddenly and quite loudly, began to cry.

The oldest kid looked at him with a stunned expression that Alec recognized. It was his dad in there. Or down there. Or whatever.

“Alec?” Sam croaked in a high pitched squeak.

“Oh boy.”

 

 

 

 

Alec got them all at the kitchen table for a meeting on how to assess the situation.

He didn’t have much experience with this kind of nonsensical crap but it didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened. Everyone standing within a few feet of that box had been exposed to a blast pattern effect that erased a few decades of age from the closest to the furthest.

Bobby hadn’t really stopped crying but Alec thought most two-year olds might just do that. He petted the blond puff of hair on his head and tried bouncing him on a knee. Dean had been standing right next to Bobby, but he was definitely several years older. Sam had been the furthest and he’d been the least affected. If you could call being reduced to a ten year old coming out on top of the deal.

“Alec, I don’t want you to go near that box.”

Alec studied the skinny boy with his father’s eyes and familiar pout. While Sam had gotten a lot smaller, he pretty much sounded almost the same.

“I mean it, Alec,” Sam wouldn’t sit in his chair. “I think we should leave the house.”

“In a second,” Alec said. “Just… just give me a second here okay?” Their clothes were still hanging off them like a bunch of kids playing dress up. Alec experienced a moment of terror when he considered that one of them might have been armed before they shrank.

“Dean?” he asked. “Are you carrying a gun?”

It hadn’t occurred to Alec until now that his uncle hadn’t said a single word since the box went off.

“Hey, Dean? What’s wrong?”

Dean was an even scrawnier little kid than Sam was. He had kind of goofy ears and a startled expression that made Alec uneasy. Chest heaving, tears began to well bright in Dean’s big eyes.

“No, Dean. Don’t do that. No?” Alec ordered.

Sam watched his brother for a moment before his eyes started to water up too.

“Sam! No, I said no!”

Sam looked back and forth between them and gnawed anxiously on his lip.

“Keep it together people!” Alec demanded. “This is serious!”

Dean shoved his face down into his folded arms and started to quietly bawl.

“Nononono,” Alec moved to his side the best he could with Bobby screaming in his ear. “It’s okay? Look, Dean? See, I’m smiling right? This is all gonna be fine. We just gotta figure out what that box did and then fix you right up--”

“Alec,” Sam sniffled. “T-There’s someone here.”

Alec looked in a panic at the front door. He’d been so distracted he hadn’t even heard a car pull up. “Crap,” he thought fast. “Okay, you take B-Bobby upstairs and hang out for a while, okay?”

But Dean didn’t move from his seat at the table.

“Dean?” Alec snapped a few times in his face. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I think he’s five,” Sam offered. “Maybe.. Maybe four?”

“Oh,” Alec said. “Dean? Can you follow Sam? Be a good Dean and follow Sam. There ya go!”

Sam took his brother’s hand and pulled him towards the stairs. They both forgot the baby however, and Alec had to scoop up the kid on his way to the front door as the bell started going off. Answering the front door with a wailing child on his hip wasn't something he’d ever pictured himself doing, but there was a first for everything.

There was an elderly priest standing on the porch with a suitcase.

“Hello!” the man glanced down at Bobby with a smile. “Did I interrupt someone’s lunch?”

“What? No. I mean, kinda?” Alec smiled back. “You know how kids like to.. uh, eat.”

“Well, I’m very sorry to disturb you like this but I’m here to see Pastor Samuel if he’s available?”

“I-I’m sorry, who are you again?”

“I’m Father Chavez,” he held out his hand. “Samuel invited me here to look into state financial aid for some of members of his parish suffering from the current layoffs and--”

“Oh! Right. I see. Aren’t you a day early?”

“I believe this is the date we set?” he cleared his throat and looked at his watch. “If this is a bad time I could always come back in a few months when I return to the United States-”

“No need for that,“ Alec tried to stop talking but he couldn’t. “You found him. That’s me. I’m the Pastor.”

The man on the front step only lost a couple of beats before his smile was back in place.

“I see? Everyone always told me Pastor Samuel was young but I had no idea you were quite this--”

“Aw, stop that. You’re killin’ me.”

“Is this your... son?”

Alec had almost forgotten Bobby who had quieted down with their conversation.

“No! My son is … upstairs. This is my sister’s. She’s kind of a drunk. Always dumping off her kids while she goes to screw some guys down at the truck stop.”

“O-Oh.”

“I know, she’s quite the whore but we love her anyway. Because you know, God loves everybody even if they’re whores.”

“Right.”

“You want to come in?”

“Yes, thank you?”

“And uh, you wouldn’t happen to know how to change a diaper would ya?”

 

 

 

 

 

It had taken Alec the rest of the afternoon, but he figured out how handle it as fast as he could.

A couple of phone calls found Father Chavez a place to stay in town that wasn’t coated in cursed objects and loaded guns. And to sweeten the deal the same lady with an extra guest room had taken one look at Bobby and solved that problem too. Although the woman had staked claim to the upset baby with a ferocity that should have made Alec nervous, he was too relieved to think much more about it.

He paused at the foot of the stairs.

For kids they sure were quiet.

When he got up to the first bedroom and still didn’t see them he wondered if they’d left the house somehow. But then he heard a small voice down the hallway calling out his name. Alec could feel the mind behind the voice now too, his father’s thoughts coming brighter and cluttered, too fast to hold like a butterfly caught under a glass.

“Sam?”

“I’m in here.”

Alec found his dad sitting awkwardly in the corner of the very back room. He’d put on a T-shirt to wear that came down to his knees, his legs and feet bare. There was no furniture or anything else in there and Alec realized his father had come here to hide.

“Where’s Dean?” Alec asked.

Sam pointed behind him.

Alec frowned at the closed closet door. “Okay,” he said. “That’s enough of this. Why are you guys sitting around in the dark? It’s weird. That guy wasn’t going to do anything. He’s really nice by the way. He’s really excited about giving a bunch of money into that charity thing you got going on.”

It took him a moment to spot Dean shoved back in the corner. Alec found an arm and started to pull him back into the light of day.

And then Dean proceeded to freak the fuck out.

“Okay! Okay!” Alec quickly let go. “Take it easy! It’s just me! You know who I am right?” Looking into the wide green eyes, Alec could tell that Dean knew exactly who he was and couldn’t have cared less. “Come on, work with me.”

“He won’t come out.” Sam said.

“Why not?” Alec tried pulling on a leg this time and got a bite on the hand. “What’s going on?”

Sam and Dean were silent.

“What… are you tired?” Alec tried. “You need some food?”

“Alec, I…,” Sam scratched at his head. “I don’t feel right.”

“Are you in pain?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

Sam suddenly looked mortified. “I’m scared.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know how old I am,” Sam wiped his nose with his hand. “I think-I think--”

Alec held up his hands and took a deep breath. “Look, I’d be scared in here too,” he looked around the dismal dark. “Let’s go downstairs.”

Dean started making some weird whimpering noise from the depths of the closet.

“No, no, don’t start that up again,” Alec skipped the persuasion part and picked him up despite the savage kicking. “We’re all going downstairs and we’re gonna watch cartoons. Cartoons are great. And we’re gonna eat something and we’re not going to be scared because there’s nothing to be scared of.”

Dean stopped flailing around long enough to listen to that last part.

“Nothin’ is gonna happen to you,” Alec explained. “Because for something to happen to you means something has to kick my ass first and my ass is hard to kick. Is everyone listening?”

Sam appeared slightly more willing to leave the room.

“That stupid magic box really nailed you guys, huh?” Alec sighed.

“Where’s Bobby?” Sam suddenly thought to ask.

“Living it up.” Alec guessed.

Alec thought it was a good sign when Dean finally grabbed him in a choke hold tight around the neck and hung there for dear life. It beat getting kicked to death in the liver and kidneys. He also thought it was an even better sign when Dean hopefully whispered the name of a likely cartoon in his ear as they went down the stairs.

“Hey, Sam?” Alec ventured. “Do you have any outlines for church services? You know like um, lesson plans for the flock? Prayer lists? That kind of stuff?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I got some.”

“That’s good because I’ll be needing to take a look at it when you get the chance.”

Sam’s brow creased in worry.

“It’s okay,” Alec assured him. “I have a really good public speaking voice. The uniform might not fit too great though…”

“W-What are you talking about?”

“Nothing!” Alec smiled. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

“But-But--”

“Do you want hot dogs or grilled cheese? How about both. With some coffee?”

Everything was completely and utterly under control. He could deal with it. Alec picked up the telephone before he realized he wouldn’t be able to get a hold of Bobby. Slamming the receiver back down he thought that was a real damn shame too.

Because he probably would have known exactly what the hell to do next.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Alec POV. A cursed music box turns everyone (except Alec) into a little kid. The Hijinks Ensue._

Alec was having a really great dream.

By divine happenstance he had somehow achieved complete control over the filthy house and all the Lysol. With no one to interfere every room had been completely emptied, the floors waxed and windows shined. Books were neatly stacked. Tile was bleached. Sinks were scoured.

It was blissful and glittering in the sunlight…

He rolled over and stretched across the mattress without opening his eyes.

“Alec? Alec wake up!”

The high-pitched voice in his ear made his smile falter a little bit. There had been another part to the dream he’d had. It had been a lot less pleasant and pretty freaking weird.

Alec reluctantly opened his eyes and saw two little boys staring down at him anxiously.

“You have to get up,” Sam whispered. “That man is back.”

The cat was struggling in and out of Dean’s hands like a pissed off Slinky toy.

Okay, so only some of it had been a beautiful dream. The house still looked like it always did. It actually even appeared a little worse than usual after last night’s coffee session with the cartoons. Alec still wasn’t sure how that much puke could come out of a kid as skinny and small as Dean currently was. Sam had taken to the caffeine like a trooper though. In fact, he got so wired he helped Alec for an hour putting together financial aid applications for Father Chavez. Before he puked and crashed too.

“Leave my cat alone,” Alec told Dean. “And put on some clothes. I understand our roots are white trash but we don’t have to be proud of it--”

“Come on,” Sam tugged at his hand. “Hurry up!”

“And nobody gets any more beer,” Alec yawned. “Except for me.”

 

 

 

Father Chavez was very grateful for all the paperwork, but slightly confused that all their business was conducted on the porch in boxer shorts. Alec tried to keep his smile intact while the priest expressed how much he was looking forward to the services that evening. It was easy to fool one guy no problem but the entire town might notice that Alec wasn’t their real Pastor.

He stood there waving goodbye at the rental car until he suddenly remembered that he had to feed the kids.

Or his parents.

Whatever.

Alec watched his carefully assembled P&J sandwiches be picked apart and licked clean.

He caught Sam mashing some of his sandwich between his teeth for his own amusement. And apparently the amusement of his brother, because suddenly they were trying to outdo one another in Wonder Bread mutilation.

“Someone’s gonna choke,” Alec said “Quit it.”

Sam shrugged and Dean slurped back in his food.

“I could use some cooperation you know,” Alec found some stale leftover coffee. “I think everyone should start thinking about Team Work.”

Dean stuck out his tongue in an effort to look at it.

“There’s no I in WE. Or ME in Group. Or however that stupid saying goes.”

Although Alec was tired, Sam and Dean appeared wide awake and ready for action. They should be considering they both slept like rocks. Alec hadn’t minded that part too much. He kind of liked how they could all fit in one bed and no one seemed to mind the overlapping.

“And you guys stink,” Alec said. “Like more than usual.”

“Shut up,“ Sam frowned. “Do not.”

“Do too.” Alec countered.

Alec waited for Dean to say something and realized that the kid didn’t talk much. In fact, he didn’t speak at all. He supposed that the both of them were kind of freakishly well behaved for children. Even the X5s back in the barracks broke out in the occasional pillow fight when the time was right. But Alec could sense some lingering adulthood hanging on in Sam and Dean’s head.

Except for the cat torturing parts and an occasional requirement for aid in the bathroom.

“Are you sure you told the Father what I said?” Sam’s vocabulary might have changed but his tone was still there. “Are you sure he’s not going to come tonight?”

“Come where?” Alec took Dean’s discarded bread crusts.

“The church.”

“Oh, yeah,“ Alec tried to ignore his dad’s gaze narrowing on him. “I took care of all that.”

“Me now?” Dean’s voice was funny, like a raspy squeak of air. He even raised his hand like they were sitting in a class room. "Me?"

Sam’s aggravation evaporated at the sound of his brother, his agitated legs under the table stopping in mid-kick. Alec saw that Dean was waiting impatiently for some kind of prompting before he continued.

“Go ahead, Dean. Speak up.”

Dean pushed expectantly at his plate.

“He’s still hungry,” Sam got back to his own sandwich. “And he wants milk.”

Wondering how the hell Sam had picked that up from one plate-push, Alec quickly moved to comply.

“I want some milk too,” Sam added. “Chocolate milk?”

“Sure.”

It didn’t occur to Alec until he was pouring milk into glasses that his dad had just asked him for permission. Thinking of the music box he‘d stashed in the attic, he wondered for the first time what the thing’s full effect might be. He’d also been hoping real bad that its lame magic would just wear off, but he knew that was probably a nice pipe dream too. Nothing around here was ever that easy.

“I’m done!” Sam announced.

“Uh.. okay,” Alec didn’t know how to answer that one. “Thanks?”

Leaving their dishes on the table, Dean hastily slid out of his chair and followed Sam to wherever it was that he was going. Alec expected the television to turn on but he heard the groan of the pipes instead. He was glad Sam was giving himself a shower because he wasn’t quite sure he was up to orchestrating a forced shampooing. Helping himself to the milk, Alec paused when he heard another shrill voice joining his father’s in the echo of the upstairs bathroom.

Looked like Dean liked to talk after all.

Just not with everybody.


	7. Chapter 7

Alec had to admit that the priest gear fit a lot better than he’d hoped.

Turning around in the mirror he discovered that the only really important thing was the white collar anyway and that didn’t have a height requirement. The black shirt was a little long in the sleeves but rolling it up a little didn’t look that strange. Ironed pants, polished shoes, a solemn expression of enlightenment and this sham was good to go. He stopped admiring his piety long enough to fix his hair.

The collar even came up high enough to cover the barcode.

He plugged in the last lamp he could find and sighed when it did nothing to further illuminate the dreary little office. Maybe Alec had been raised under the glare of too many fluorescent bulbs, but the gloomy half-light his family liked to operate in got on his nerves. He opened the curtains instead, clouds of dust wafting through the shafts of sunlight as he pried open the panes to let in some fresh air while he was at it.

Alec heard Dean before he saw him.

The weeping didn’t have that furious pitch behind it that other kids usually had. It was like Dean was too tired to do it right, letting out something breathless and subdued instead. Alec quickly located him sitting alone in the corner of the dirt driveway and clutching his arm. Feeling a twinge of irritation at himself for not knowing what his charges had been up to for the last few hours, Alec took a shortcut out the window.

“Stay right there!” Alec called. “I’m coming!”

Using the porch roof and a tree to help him not mess up his uniform on the way down, he was standing next to Dean in no time flat.

“You all right?” Alec examined Dean’s bloody elbow and then a nearby bucket. Then he spotted a hammer sticking out of a box of cereal. And what looked like the telephone shattered into a hundred little pieces. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

Dean tried kicking Alec in the face but the crying threw off his aim.

Alec had found a bunch of little kid clothes in a donation bag out in the shed, but there were brand new rips in the denim knees and mud on Dean’s T-shirt with a tiger declaring: Born to be Wild! But he could tell that the cuts and scratches weren’t really what was causing all the ruckus.

“Where’s Sam?” Alec asked.

Dean pointed at the church down the hill.

“Are you kiddin’ me?” Alec said.

Dean shook his head.

“Shouldn‘t he be out here hanging out with you?”

Dean stopped shaking his head and began to nod uncertainly. Alec stood his uncle up and made sure everything else on him still worked before heading down the drive. Dean dug the hammer out of the cereal box and followed at a distance.

The church doors were closed but they had been unlocked.

Alec rattled them once and could tell they hadn’t been unlocked in the conventional way. Sam wasn’t the kind of man that required a key, and apparently he wasn’t the kind of child that did either.

He reached out with his mind and caught glimpses of his father listening to him enter the empty building. It was surprising how Sam’s thoughts felt now. The simple primary colors of youth should have been easy to read, but the complexity of the lingering adult smeared them around into something inscrutable. Stepping into the cool dark of the vestibule, Alec thought for the very first time what Sam’s childhood might have been like. Growing up in Manticore had taught Alec to believe that any family that lived outside the barbed wire fences had to be perfect. It even made him a little angry when anyone who grew up normal showed the slightest dissatisfaction or dared suggest that what they’d had might not have been.

But when he saw Sam sitting by himself on the pulpit steps, he considered what kind of little boy would be using a sunny afternoon to sit alone in dim candlelight with a book.

“Hi, Sam,” Alec didn’t have to be loud to be heard. “Was looking for you for hours.”

“You’ve been in my office for hours.”

Alec wondered if lying to Sam now would be considered worse for any reason.

“I heard Dean so I came outside.”

“It’s weird huh? It looks like nothing ever happened in here,” Sam glanced up the center aisle and the new pews. “No one would ever know there was a fire.”

“Can still smell it,” Alec said. “Like burnt toast.”

A few weeks back he had helped out some, but it had been his uncle and dad that had done most of the work to get the church back into shape. They hadn’t wanted him near what had been an open gate even if every trace of it had fizzled away back into nothing. But it was pretty damn amazing what a coat of varnish and some belt sanding could accomplish. You’d never guess in a million years that an entry to hell had been ripped open in this very spot...

“A-And the ceiling,” Sam said. “Couldn’t fix that.”

Alec looked up at the perfect circle singed into the wood over their heads. The circumference was large and perfect, but far enough up in the shadows of the eaves that no one would notice unless they were looking for it. Alec was imagining the flames that had burned there when he realized Sam was now looking at him instead.

More specifically, Alec’s borrowed priestly attire.

“You like it?” Alec grinned. “It‘s a little loose in the shoulders but otherwise it’s a great fit.”

“I know I haven’t been totally honest with this town but-but this is different. It’s not a nice thing to do. These people tell me things in …in,” Sam took a second to find the word, “…confidence… and they trust me with things, important private things.”

“I know. I totally get it,” Alec said. “Look, I told Chavez to come a few hours early for a meet and greet with the lady from the aid program. I won’t even see the congregation unless someone shows up uninvited, and that might be a hassle but don’t worry about it because--”

“Thanks, Alec. I appreciate you doing all this,” Sam folded his arms around his knees and somehow looked even smaller. “A lot of people are counting on me… counting on me to help them out…”

“Speaking of which,” Alec cleared his throat. “You can’t go leaving Dean around with cereal and telephones like that. Remember all those inspiring speeches I gave about Team Work?”

“He’s right outside,” Sam said quickly. “I gave him stuff to play with.”

“The guy is like 4-years-old,” Alec said. “He could get backed over by a car or a coyote or something.”

“B-But he wouldn’t come in here.”

Alec glanced back over his shoulder and saw Dean still waiting just outside on the stairs.

“Why not?”

“Because he said it’s where we keep dead people.”

Alec had a brief flash of the crypts and the black marble tomb that sat somewhere beneath them in the basement. Ben had left him for dead under that slab of rock. Prepared him for eternity, probably said a lovely prayer, and sealed him under the stone like tucking in a child goodnight. He had never thought about his uncle being bothered by finding him like that. And maybe Dean hadn’t been thinking much about it at all until the music box came along.

“Is this whole thing getting worse?” Alec wasn’t sure if ‘worse’ was the right word. “Do you think that you might be becoming more and more like… real kids?”

“I’ve been reading, but I can’t read everything as fast. I don’t understand everything I see anymore either,” Sam wiped an arm over his eyes. “But I’ll find something. I just need more time.”

Sam looked worriedly at the scatter of books behind him and all around the altar. His father had said he’d needed more time as if he knew for a fact it was steadily running out. The coherency he could keep up for now was draining out of his head like sand, grain by grain until the brain would finally match the body.

“I’ll take another look at that music box,” Alec said. “Maybe there’s something written on it that can help?”

“No way, Alec. I told you not to touch it,” Sam told him. “What if this happens to you too?”

“No biggie,“ Alec had already thought of that peculiar outcome. “What’s the worst that can happen? I give it a shot and maybe I get zapped into a zygote. You’re old enough to keep us all alive until the cops get here and then--”

“And then what?” Sam stood up.

Alec realized that the fierce look in his dad’s eyes was fear.

“And then, I don’t know… I just mean that everything will be fine, Sam.”

“No cops,” Sam looked around like the flash of sirens might start pulling up in front of the church at any second. “Do you hear me? They’ll take us away. They won’t listen to us and we won’t be able to do anything about it. We won’t be able to do anything!”

“Hey, relax. I-I’m sorry,” Alec stepped forward as Sam backed up almost behind the podium, his chest heaving and his eyes glittering wet. “I won’t try out the music box, okay? I won’t even look at it.”

“You promise?” Sam asked. “Swear you’ll promise!”

The ridiculous demand was so innocently sincere that Alec could only answer in kind. “I swear,” he nodded. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Sam calmed slightly with those words and Alec was forced once again to wonder who the little boy in front of him really was. All the running and hiding. The distrust of strangers. Sitting in the dark until the coast was clear.

They both turned at the sound of his uncle’s squeaky rasp.

“Alec? Alec! ALEC!”

“I’m right here. With Sam. And hey, there’s not a dead person in sight either so why don’t you come on in?”

“Come back?“ Dean demanded tentatively. “Come back out now?”

Alec turned and saw the kid leaning through the double doors as far as he could without actually touching the floors. And with a sudden and painful pang of jealousy, Alec knew he still would have taken the standard Winchester childhood over his own any day of the week.

“What if Father Chavez saw us?” Sam’s lower lip began to tremble. “What if he doesn’t believe what you said?”

It was a good thing Alec knew all about the art of distraction.

“So, are you going to keep it all to yourself or what?” Alec adjusted his white collar and pressed jacket. “I ain’t got all day.”

“Huh?” Sam blinked in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“You never said how awesome I look.”

Alec watched Sam fight back a smile for a few seconds before giving up. He liked the sight of that grin a lot, but he really liked how it looked on his father as a child. In one split second it changed all that apprehension directly into unabashed joy. But then it became clear that Sam was also trying pretty hard not to laugh.

“What?” Alec was willing to take a smirk at his own expense but this was pushing it. “What’s so funny?”

“Are you afraid of heights? Sam covered his mouth with both hands.

“No?”

“Well, your zipper is!”

Alec put two and two together and realized he’d just heard a lame yet somewhat brilliant joke. And he also quickly saw that his festive Christmas-theme boxers (also borrowed) were sticking out through the open fly of his trousers. “I knew that,” he grumbled. “Just waitin’ for you to finally notice.”

Sam kept right on laughing it up.

“That’s what you get buyin’ polyester suits with stupid cheap zippers anyway--”

“Alec!” Dean had ventured a few feet into no man’s land and was hopping around like the ground was electrified. “Come back now! Come back! COME BACK!”

“Settle down, I’m coming!” Alec checked his fly one more time before turning his attention to the front doors. “No! No, Dean! Bad Dean! Get your ass off that banister ‘cause you’re gonna-- aw crap,” he gave up and knelt down to help Sam collect his books. “By the way, have you people recently had your tetanus shots? Because you should know that this entire place is a staph infection waiting to happen.”

Sam blew out the last of the candles he was using.

“Now that‘s really funny,” Alec caught the large bible still sitting open on the step. “You do that a lot?”

“What?” Sam slammed it closed. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Sure,” Alec half smiled. “I’ve never seen anyone write in a bible before. I thought that was against the law or something.”

“Just some notes.”

Sam pushed past him and almost ran out the front doors.

Alec supposed most kids liked to deface text books when they were bored. Although Sam’s graffiti wasn’t the usual array of talking phallic symbols and disproportioned killer robots, it was a mad tangle of scribble where there shouldn’t have been any at all. He pulled at the snug collar around his neck and checked his watch.

It was almost time to be the Pastor.

With a grin he imagined what would happen if he wore this get up down to the bar on the freeway. However, the fantasy of wantonly confessional women rapidly disintegrate as he remembered he’d also have two kids waiting for him in the backseat.

Sam was dragging Dean by the hand back to the house.

Alec’s smile faded as he listened to their inane chatter about Thunder Cats and macaroni and cheese. He was going to have another look at the music box tonight. And he was going to get on top of this situation before it got any more complicated than it already was. Besides, his family figured out preposterous and illogical problems like this one all the time.

How difficult could it possibly be?


	8. Chapter 8

Alec liked the combination of car maintenance and divine spiritual guidance.

Not that he could accomplish either with great efficiency at the same time, but the long black cassock never showed any oil stains and its voluminous drape was good for wiping off tools.

“Are you sure ma’am?” Alec held the phone with one hand while he examined a carburetor with the other. “’Cause we sure do miss having little Bobby around. All the non-stop screeching and messin’ his pants? I’m telling you its like an angel has left the building.”

The cheerful mother of seven on the other end of the line dismissed such nonsense, and assured him that another delightful child in her happy home was fine with her. She was just so grateful she was able to help when she could, considering the questionable lifestyle of the missing mother.

“Well, we sure want to thank you for helping out,” Alec said. “In the mean time, your car doesn’t look so bad. Just needs a few new parts and it’ll be back on the road in no time.”

It was her turn to start thanking him non-stop and asking if he was sure he didn’t mind the hassle. Yanking on the loose fuel pump, Alec figured that resuscitating the ancient mini-van was the least he could do for a woman willing to deal with Bobby’s loaded diapers. She went onto explain how’d she’d wrecked the thing at an intersection two towns over and she was just so sick and tired of the dangers of today’s unsafe roads.

“Well, you know what the philosopher Confucius said about driving?” he tried a joke he’d heard Dean make at the garage. “A man who drives like hell is bound to get there.”

He heard an uncertain pause before her polite laugh crackled over the telephone line.

“Yeah, anyway, I can have this all done in a few days,” he said. “I’ll even wash all that crayon off the backseats. Unless uh, you wanted it there? Oh… oh, okay, yeah, I can wash the magic marker off the windows too. And the doors. A-And the inside of the trunk? You got it!”

Alec wasn’t sure what she said before she hung up, but it sounded close enough to another big thank you. Looking at the engine one more time, he decided to take the transmission apart piece by piece and clean it until it shined. That air filter could go too, and so could every crusty spark plug coated in a few decades of grease--

“Alec!”

“I’m out front, Sam!”

“Alec, I gotta show you something!”

“In a second.”

Tossing an oil rag aside, he sat down on the porch stairs next to a large cardboard box. The thing was stuffed with hundreds and hundreds (949 to be exact) of completed applications. In about an hour he had to sit with Father Chavez and have a pow-wow with a not-so-kindly Federal Accountant who would decide if all their efforts were a waste of time or not.

Flipping through all the carefully filed last names, Alec wondered how long it would take to simply steal the funds that Sam was going through all the trouble to respectfully ask for.

“Alec, you have to see this!”

It wasn’t as if the little town was asking for heated pools and brand new cars either. The small amounts allocated to each individualized family looked like more of a stipend for a winter worth of heat. Or groceries. Maybe a couple doctor’s bills.

“ALEC!”

He dropped the box on the steps and hurried in the direction of the backyard.

Sam was breathless with excitement. In fact, the happy and contented look on his face was so distracting that Alec almost didn’t notice the music box sitting in his hands.

“W-What are you doing? Put that down! You’ll turn into a fetus!”

“It works! It goes both ways!”

“How do you know?”

Sam looked guilty all of a sudden, the sunny gaze turning sullen as he started jamming the toe of his sneaker into the dirt.

“Where’s Dean?” Alec needed to know. “Where’d he go?”

“He’s over there,” Sam said. “In that tree.”

Alec turned just in time to see a hammer fall from about twenty feet and re-smash the telephone that was laid out in the fallen leaves below like a modern art mosaic. The cereal hadn’t suffered the same fate however. Tony the Tiger was up in the branches with Dean for emergency sustenance.

And his uncle looked fine. Really high up above the ground, but otherwise intact. Sam looked fine too. But how his father had figured out that this thing worked in reverse was still a mystery--

“Mrrr-ack-mmr-mroooo.”

Alec had never heard a more decrepit and horrible sound come out of a living thing. He carefully picked up the mottled gray heap of fur collapsed at his feet. The animal was nothing but skin and bones, teeth missing and the once bright eyes cloudy with cataracts. “What- what is this?”

Sam’s smile came back in full force. “I played the music and the cat got old!”

“This isn’t old, Sam,” Alec corrected him. “This is what science calls almost dead.”

“But now we can do it!” Sam clapped. “And we can be like we used to be!”

“No,” Alec shook his head. “No way.” The cat started purring like an asthmatic when Alec scratched the tattered ears.

“Why not?”

“I got one reason right here!” Alec wanted to shake the cat in Sam’s face for emphasis but he didn't want to break the damn thing. “Does this look RIGHT to you?”

“Cats age a lot faster than people,” Sam explained. “And it wouldn’t get away from the box when the egg timer went off and--”

Alec grabbed the music box and pushed Sam towards the porch. “Get Dean and your ass in the house and don’t answer the door when the Father gets here.”

“W-What are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna fix my cat.” Alec clutched the animal closer. “And then you.”

 

 

 

 

Alec placed the box in the middle of the back yard and considered his options.

There was nothing written anywhere on it but there was a tiny crank to turn on the music. He had listened to Sam’s explanation of accidentally mummifying their pet and he got the gist of the mechanism inside. This thing worked in two directions and that was good news, but the thing was also created specifically to fuck up someone’s day.

Alec was trying to keep that important detail in mind.

“Let’s try this backwards, huh?”

Using a flipped over laundry basket to contain the cat and the box, Alec let the crank go and blurred backwards out of range. The music clinked and pinged the wrong way down a century old Russian tune and gradually ground down to silence again. When Alec peeked back around the side of the house, he braced himself for just about anything.

“Here boy!” Alec whistled. “Are you dead?”

There were paws and a nose poking through the plastic net of the basket. The cat looked the opposite of dead. In fact, the kitten appeared suspiciously a lot like when Alec had first rescued it from the storm drain all those weeks ago. The little guy could fit perfectly into the palm of his hand again with its radar dish ears back to their ludicrous proportions.

“Would ya look at that?” Alec’s shoulders hitched in a laugh. “It worked.”

Alec’s felt his heart skip a beat as the music box started to chime again all by itself. The day went dark as clouds began to blot out the late afternoon sun, the light flickering and dimming as rain began to fall. The music picked up as the gears slipped into motion, the crank turning one complete and full rotation before abruptly ending mid-note again.

After it was over Alec realized he hadn’t been able to move.

The kitten in his lap was less than a day old now, delicate pink paws, eyes closed and unable to lift itself off its white soft belly.

“Kitty!” Alec felt unreasonable amounts of glee. “It’s kitty for me!”

He clamped oddly small hands over his mouth.

It was a bizarre relief to see Sam suddenly appear on the porch even if he was wearing a Power Ranger sweatshirt and hefting a hammer. Alec realized he was now tangled in a sea of black cloth, the cassock that hung and draped down to his ankles now burying him under its stifling weight. He simultaneously experienced panic and terror when he realized he couldn’t stay upright long enough to walk. When he opened his mouth he also discovered the frustration of not being able to articulate any of this new information to his ten-year-old father.

But Alec could say one thing just fine.

“Sam!” Alec held out his arms up in a effort to convey something. Exactly what he wasn‘t sure, but it was pure agony when his dad didn’t seem like he was going to pick him up. “SAM!”

“What’d you do, Alec?” Sam asked. “What happened?”

“I fixed the kitty,” Alec said miserably. “See?”

Alec wanted to explain how the music went backwards and forwards but all he could think about was how he’d messed up. He wasn’t supposed to be like this and now Sam was going to be angry. He didn’t want Sam angry. He wanted Sam to be happy. Alec was just trying to make things right. Alec was just trying--

“Alec, hey, don’t do that!”

The house was shaking and the window glass was rattling in the panes. Alec rubbed at his burning eyes and started to really cry because he knew he could do a lot more than make it all shake. But he didn’t know how to stop it. Dean came cautiously out the back door, looking up at the clattering house in bewildered awe.

“Sam do it!” Alec groped for the box. “Sam do it!”

Father Chavez’s rental car pulled up on the opposite side of the house, tires grinding in the gravel and a friendly greeting honk on the horn to announce his arrival.

Alec watched his father and uncle’s eyes go perfectly round.

And then he wet himself.


	9. Chapter 9

Sam didn’t have the whole deal completely figured out yet, but the end results were hard to miss.

His breath caught in his throat when the music box almost slipped out of his sweaty grip, the music lurching for a brief moment with one disjointed chord in the dark. It was sweltering hot inside the cramped tool shed and its walls were practically Dean-proof.

“Sam?” Dean was right outside the door. “Lemme in there.”

“No! Stay right where you are!”

The fragile wooden box was oddly cool despite the temperature. The delicate gears inside would certainly break if he did anything the wrong way. And if Sam broke the box that would mean no more music. And no more music meant a gruesome disaster of unparalleled and horrific proportions. Slumping to his knees, Sam wondered if he’d had this penchant for drama all his life, or it was just renewed adolescence spicing up his hysterics.

The barricade of the garden hose and rakes weren’t going to keep his brother out for much longer.

“Cut it out you jerk!” Sam shouted. “You gotta stay out there with Alec!”

“B-But the man is gonna find us!”

“I just need a minute,” What Sam really needed was an entire afternoon to fine tune himself back into 37-year-old shape. But all he had were seconds before Father Chavez gave up on the front door and decided to take a walk around their backyard instead. “J-Just give me a minute, okay?”

With a frown, he carefully felt out the small shape of the crank on the box’s side. In Alec’s enthusiasm the flimsy mechanism got wound so tight that the old thing clearly didn’t have many turns left in it before the coils finally snapped. Thanking his lucky stars that the thing still went forward, he twisted it as gently as he could and started to count down slowly from ten.

Sam knew he was taller right away.

Heaving opening the shed doors, he saw heaven, earth and everything in between was back in the correct perspective. Dean was looking up at him. Up, up and up until he finally found Sam’s face.

“That’s not you,” he scowled. “You’re still a kid.”

“This is good enough for now,” Sam scooped up Alec who was sitting a few feet away and happily shoving clumps of grass into his mouth. “And you’re my cousin now but your name is the same. You got it?”

“I’m Dean!”

“Good,” Sam experienced a smug satisfaction that his teenaged body didn’t feel as carefree as his rosy memory always insisted it had. Although, he was minus quite a few pounds which unfortunately seemed to have been all muscle mass. “What’s your favorite animal, Dean?”

Dean pointed at him. “You!”

“Funny.”

Sam breathlessly caught up with Father Chavez in the driveway.

“It’s an honor to finally meet you, Father,” he moved Alec to his other arm so he could shake hands. “After everything your firm has done with labor law in Mexico, w-we are so lucky having a lawyer with your kind of experience to help us. Thank you for answering all of my... uh all the letters and--”

“Hold on now! Just hold on,” the Father laughed. “Have we met?”

“No, sorry, I’m Pastor Samuel’s… cousin,” he said. “I live here during the summer.”

“And who are your friends?”

“The one over there with the hammer is Dean and…” Sam cleared his throat. “… a-and this one here is my son, Alec.”

“He looks just about old enough to start walking on his own I bet!”

“Yeah, he sure does.”

Sam realized the music box had made him around the right age when Alec had been a toddler for the first time. The thought made him imagine Jessica standing there with them, a gentle image of her face coming to him warm and bright as the setting sun through the trees.

He was distracted by his son making delighted and fruitless grabs for the shiny crucifix hanging on the priest’s chest. “Can you say hello to the Father, Alec?”

Alec stopped trying to score the crucifix and promptly shoved his face into Sam’s neck.

“He’s a shy one I see?” Father Chavez said.

“I guess so,” Sam held Alec a little closer, suddenly wishing he hadn’t been in such a rush to meet with the priest despite all the people in town depending on it. He wanted to hold Alec for a while and look for all of the other things he’d missed. Maybe see if Alec would talk a little more. Find out what made him curious. What made him laugh--

“This house is blessed with so many children,” the Father said with a nod. “How wonderful.”

Sam found himself smiling back.

He made sure he sounded grave and concerned as he explained that Pastor Samuel had taken their wayward female relation to a half-way house in the next county. When the harried accountant arrived late in her rented SUV, Sam listened to Father Chavez calmly go through the motions of setting up a meeting on a porch with folding chairs like he did it everyday. No one seemed to mind Sam sitting in while Alec dozed in the string hammock in the corner. Dean stayed in sight with a cereal box and a (empty) tool case, but he was quiet too. They all drank iced tea and discussed the details as the sun went down.

Sam breathed a sigh of relief when the priest and the federal accountant finally shook hands. When the woman turned to collect her things, Father Chavez gave Sam a sly and triumphant wink behind her back.

The money was as good as theirs.

“Would you like to stay for dinner, Father?” Sam asked.

“I’d like that.”

He hoped the guy didn’t mind leftovers.

 

 

 

The elderly man had smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, the aroma of the leaves lingering heavy and humid like the weather in a hot country. The pleasant scent remained long after the man had wished them well and driven off, filled to the brim with fried chicken and boiled corn right from the fields out back.

“Can I have one more?” Dean asked.

There were six chocolate chip cookies left on the plate and Dean had already eaten three.

“Please?” Dean’s hope was shifting into despair. “One more?”

Sam nodded and watched his brother forgo the risk of future denial by simply taking the entire plate away for hiding.

“Dude,” Sam said. “At least leave me one.”

“No!”

After dinner Sam had played the music box until he knew he was back to where he should be. There was no guessing or mistakes. The years clicked into place just as exactly and perfectly as the fitted gears found each other in the machine. But he hadn’t been able to help himself from examining his hand to see if he could actually tell that time had been properly realigned.

Nothing there but a few scars.

When he was done he hid the box back in the shed before Dean saw it.

They all sat outside while the sunset dimmed pink and gold on the clouds. Alec liked to sit on his lap so Sam kept him there. His son kept twisting around in Sam’s arms until he was sometimes laying upside down. He liked to feel Sam’s chin and mouth with his sticky fingers and laugh like someone had told a joke. When Alec couldn’t think of enough words to say he’d sing them instead, a sleepy drone of noise that he took up and left off as his eyes opened and closed. When Sam spoke to Dean, Alec’s small body would still as he listened, his heart pounding under Sam’s hand steady and strong.

“Look what I did!” Dean said.

“That one sucked,” Sam laughed. “Do another one.”

Dean always liked showing off even if only one other person was watching.

Sam knew the last glimmer of the adult in his brother had faded away hours ago. It had been about around when Dean decided to start to collecting fireflies and putting them in a jar. Sam had felt the slip of his own awareness before he played the music box and brought himself back. Bits and pieces of his mind had been vanishing into the easy bliss of childhood. But none of it was disappearing forever. The music box just tucked it to sleep with all the worries and cares of the grown up world. And now Dean was too far gone to even realize anything had happened to him at all. There was no demand or urgency that the problem be solved. There was no panic that nothing had been done to restore him to his normal state. But that was okay, because Sam knew how the magic worked and the one-hundred-year old talisman wasn‘t going anywhere for at least this one night.

The moon had come out with a few stars, the pink glow of the sun still dying on the horizon.

And it turned out that Dean had been collecting the fireflies for Alec. One by one until the jar glowed like a lantern. Sam liked how careful Alec was when he held them each one by one. Not mashing them into pieces or smearing them just to see how long their insides would keep giving off their pale light.

“Look, Alec,” Dean said. “Look.”

It felt cruel to interrupt them.

So Sam didn’t.


	10. Chapter 10

The music box made a very startling and peculiar noise when it imploded.

They’d all stared at it in disbelief until Alec let out a strange laugh he’d tried hard to hold in.

As it turned out, keeping the highly mobile Baby-Bobby in one spot wasn’t easy nor possible. So to solve that issue they’d employed the up-side down laundry basket technique that had worked so well on the cat. And everything was fine until the magic box blew its springs out right before the timer was done ticking. The naked guy with the laundry basket on his head looked about a decade shy of the old man Bobby was supposed to be. If Sam squinted he might have even said it might have been even closer to twenty.

After Bobby got his clothes on he was in a real big hurry to get gone.

“Take it easy, man,” Dean said. “Nice… seein’ you.”

The hunter didn’t say a word as he quickly tossed his heavy bags (without aid) into his car. He even had something like a smile on his face when he slid into the drivers seat without one complaint about his aching joints.

“Bye, Bobby,” Alec waved. “Watch out for deer.”

The music box had worked just fine on Dean and Alec. Although Sam wasn’t exactly sure their years had been perfectly realigned either. Dean could have dropped half a decade or just gotten a good night’s sleep. It was difficult to tell.

The rewound cat still needed to be fed milk through an eyedropper though.

Sam watched Bobby’s car tear down the road and wondered when they’d see him again. He had a feeling that with the free battery recharge, Bobby might end up disappearing for a lot longer than the usual.

“Now what?” Alec sighed. “Everything’s back to the boring usual?”

“Yup,” Sam said with a grateful smile. “The boring usual.” He felt the crushing ennui and wanton despair come off his son with the force of a tidal wave. “But I heard Dean talking about going for hunt soon,” he lied. “This weekend.”

“You heard what?” Dean asked.

“Something is eating a bunch of hikers out in Yosemite?”

“Oh yeah,” Dean yawned. “Almost slipped my mind.”

“That sounds good,“ Alec looked relieved for a moment before worry quickly returned. “But what if it’s just a bear?”

“Might be,” Sam nodded. “Or it might not.”

Pushing open the screen door, he decided he didn’t feel too badly about stretching the truth this time. Mostly because there usually was something out there always chowing down on tourists in the state parks. But with that many square miles of back country it was hard to keep on top what was legitimate food chain action and what required a salt and burn.

“It would be good for you guys to get out,” Sam said. “Hit the road for while, get some fresh air and break in those new shotguns-”

“What about you?” Alec interrupted. “Don’t you need air like everybody else?”

“I’ve got a lot of work here that I need to catch up on.”

“Like what?”

“You want a list?” Sam had one if Alec actually said yes.

“Fine.“ His son studied him for a moment before going on. “I have a lot of stuff to do around here too.”

“Yeah, about that?” Dean dug a beer out of the fridge. “There’s a ton of weapon maintenance that needs doing whenever you feel the urge-”

“I’m gonna go fix the phone first. If that’s possible. And then I’m going to mix some milk formula because Sam said we couldn’t waste the box on the cat so now we own a fetus. Then I’m going to eat dinner which you’ll be making because I’m so busy. And then I‘m going to try to fix that music box and then-”

“Sorry, but the box is gone,” Dean informed him gladly. “Bobby took it with him.”

Alec frowned.

“We got plenty of other broken crap lying around,” Dean hooked an arm around Alec’s neck. “And you haven’t even seen the basement yet.”

Sam noted with interest that patting Alec soothingly on the head incited the same instant-fury as it did to his brother.

“S-So what are you trying to tell me here?” Alec shoved his uncle off of him. “We don’t fix any of this cursed stuff we find? We just get all fucked up by it and hope it doesn‘t brake and back over us a few more times? Like… like road kill?”

Sam had never really thought of it in those terms, but Alec was right on the money. The family business wasn’t in the custom of doing much refurbishing and hitting the antique road show for extra cash.

“So Yosemite, huh?” Alec sighed again.

“I love that place,” Dean said half-heartedly. “Lots of nice scenery, lots of untouched wilderness, lots of mosquitoes, lots of no toilets-”

“If we’re going hunting then you should come too, Sam,” Alec mumbled. “All you do when you’re alone is work anyway.”

Sam didn’t need any extra special powers to know what else his son was thinking. “I’m feeling a lot better now, Alec. A-And I‘m looking forward to getting caught up with the parish. Getting things back to normal around here is good for the town.”

Alec had never been very big on observing personal space, but ever since he’d arrived back to his correct age he’d been lingering a little closer than usual to his father’s side. Sam had to make room for him on the sofa when he sat down, Alec pushing under Sam’s arm and forcing himself into the space between the armrest. It reminded Sam a little bit of the cat.

“I kinda remember being a kid,” Alec said. “I guess you remember all of it, huh?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I do.”

Sam looked uncomfortably towards the dark television set and wished for its noisy blare for a change. The subject of remembering was something he liked to avoid as much as possible these days. Mostly because one answer would never be enough for the multitude of questions that were crowding his son‘s mind. His child had been programmed not to be satisfied with half a picture, and Alec had been given even less than that to reconcile weeks, days and hours of missing time.

“Sam?” Alec said quietly. “I had fun.”

Sam smiled before he could help himself, but it quickly faded as he felt Alec shift beside him. There was another question there. Sam could see it forming in the air between them, urgent and angry in his son’s thoughts… _The rage that rippled through the ground and shattered the windows. Waking suddenly and sick on the bare mattress in the house. Sam‘s grip on Alec‘s hand so hard he couldn‘t unmake a fist until a day later. Where were we, Sam? Where did we go?_

Sam jumped when he heard a small sound in the corner of the living room.

It was a weak and distressed mewl coming from a cardboard box.

“Right on schedule,” Alec’s watch alarm started beeping. “Feeding time.”

Leaving Alec to his duties, Sam headed up the stairs to the office and a backlog of work. It was a lot easier to get lost in the problems of his community for now. It was much simpler to immerse himself in worries that were larger and more important than his own.

Sam closed the door and welcomed the feeling of ease he always received at the sight of stacked paperwork.

Because the reality was that he really couldn’t remember a single thing after Ben had vanished through the gate that night. However, he was painfully aware of why both he and Alec had such conveniently matching memory lapses. And if Sam had removed such large portions of their long term memories he knew he must have had a pretty good reason for doing it.

The sharp pencil point broke against his paper as images burst bright and loud behind his eyes.

_Ben waiting at the foot of the stairs  
Hands pulling the cassock down over Sam’s body  
A mouth over his smothering and distorting the Lord’s Prayer  
The beautiful flames engulfing the church  
Dean’s rifle lowering as he listened to every word Ben said_

Sam very slowly put the pencil aside and folded his hands across the notebook so he could rest his forehead. Some things weren’t worth remembering.

And this time he was inclined to trust his own judgment.


	11. Chapter 11

Alec found another rule to break as soon as the summer settled into a hot and steamy July.

Their secluded home was literally off the beaten path and no one ever stopped by besides the occasional meandering cow. The church services were predictable enough to avoid and the mail was delivered to a lidded box that was a long walk or a short drive down the road. So with all the privacy and scorching weather, it made the business of forgoing clothing an easy and enjoyable thing to do.

Stretching in the bright sun on the back porch, Alec gave a smile to the clear blue sky.

“These guys out here?” he gestured to the various unclothed wildlife. “These dudes are definitely on to something.”

Dean didn’t look up from the morning paper or his breakfast on the porch table. But Alec didn’t know why his uncle felt the need to rain on his naked parade. It wasn’t like Dean didn’t walk around without much more than boxer shorts most of the time anyway.

“So where’s Pastor Jim been these days?” Alec took a seat and the glass of orange juice. “I haven’t felt an icy chill in a while.”

“Dunno,” Dean flipped through the paper. “He comes and goes.”

“Comes and goes where?”

“Los Angeles. Vegas. Sometimes he likes to hit Miami Beach.”

Alec also found cereal, a pulled apart orange and something that smelled like coffee. “I know when people are bullshitting me you know,” he explained. “I picked it up on the streets.”

Dean looked skeptically from over his paper. “The streets?”

“Yup,” Alec bit into an unattended piece of watermelon. “The streets.”

“I thought you were in an apartment and gainfully employed all within 24 hours of Manticore burning down?”

“I had a car too,” Alec spit out some seeds. “But I had to lose it for uh, practical reasons. You would of liked it though? It was an old piece of crap that used a cassette player.”

Dean flipped his paper back up. “So what else did you learn on the streets?”

“Lots of stuff.”

“Make a lot of supplemental income didja?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Before all the credit card fraud we used to do a lot of that stuff,” Dean recalled fondly. “What’s the worst thing you ever did for money?”

“You first.”

“No, no, no, you go right ahead.”

“You don’t wanna tell me because its embarrassing, right?” Alec grinned. “What did you guys do? Kinda rough lookin’ to be pool boys but I bet a couple of old ladies called you over to get the rust outta the pipes?”

“Lemme guess?” Dean’s shoulders hitched in a laugh. “I bet you were in the back of one of those cheap porn rags. Posing in a nice black-n-white with a 24hr hotline.”

“I did not!”

“Oh that’s right, you were on the streets.”

“That’s right!” Alec’s triumph lasted for about one second. “ I-I mean shut up!!”

Sam’s voice suddenly rose from inside, a tired question of warning that made them both look over their shoulders in caution.

Dean lowered his voice so they could continue. “I bet you never did anything that bad.”

“I totally did,” Alec frowned. “All the time.”

“I bet you cashed your pay check and put some aside in a 41K.”

“I sold drugs?” Alec offered snidely.

“So does the rest of the planet.”

“I hustled pool and card games? Once I even rigged a church BINGO!” Alec watched in mounting distress as his uncle widely yawned. “I-I cheated on the Jam Pony Super Bowl pool. I skimmed the register every time Normal let me cover dispatch-”

“I’ll flip ya for who tells first.”

“Flip me?”

“Yeah,” Dean cleared his throat and took on an air of seriousness that Alec didn’t see very often. “If you’re up for it.”

“I’m up for anything,” Alec quickly said. “But uh, what am I up for?”

“What I have here in my pocket is a Winchester family heirloom that has been passed down generation to generation,” Dean looked him dead in the eye. “My grand father’s father gave it to him and then he gave it to my dad and then he gave it to me. You following me so far?”

“Uh, sure?“ Alec didn’t see any pockets on Dean’s underwear but he thought he was getting the basic gist. “Heirloom. Passed down father to son. Got it.”

“It’s what we use to bring peace and harmony to any and all household disputes.”

“I wasn’t aware that we were having a dispute-”

“It has provided guidance and wisdom to our family for hundreds upon hundreds of years,” Dean slid back his newspaper and there it was like a magic trick, the sun striking it and making it gleam on the table and right into Alec’s eyes. “And today it’ll be used again.”

Alec was let down when he realized what it was. “A quarter?”

“You got it,” Dean rotated the shiny coin between thumb and forefinger. “Twenty-five cents. Two dimes and a nickel. 1/4 of a dollar.”

“If it’s from your grand father’s father then why does it have the year 1984 stamped on it?”

“This very coin has seen two world wars, three police actions and several federal prisons. It knows all and it see all. Do you here by agree that its word is law and binding?”

“Uh… okay?”

“Great,” Dean flipped the coin spinning into the air. “Heads I win, Tails you lose.”

“W-Wait--”

“CALL IT.”

“Tail-Hea-Tail- HEADS!”

“Sorry, Heads I win.”

“Wait a fucking sec-”

“So,” Dean sat back and sucked on what was left of his melon rind. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done for cash on the streets?”

Alec stared at the stupid heirloom sitting on the table between them. He had no choice. It was time to confess.

“I sold parakeets.”

“What?”

“Birds! Little birds! Green ones. And some blue ones too. I kept an all blue one for myself but it flew out the damn window and I chased it out onto a ledge and almost killed myself but it got away anyway so then I-”

“You mean like the pets?”

“Are you happy now?” Alec demanded. “I got a crate of the things off the back of a truck and I sold them. I made a killing too 'cause some ten-year old popstar had one on her shoulder in a music video so everybody wanted one and-”

“I delivered newspapers.”

“Huh?”

“When I was a kid we moved around a lot. Whenever we stayed anywhere long enough I scored myself a paper route.”

Alec sat back in baffled silence.

“Fifty bucks in my back pocket.“ Dean bit on the watermelon rind and winked. “A month!”

“Did… did you have to wear one of those safety orange vests?”

His uncle’s grin faded.

“What about tips on holidays for extra candy?”

Dean sighed and picked his paper back up.

“Did you put tassels on your handlebars and a little customized license plate on the back of your sparkly banana seat--owCH!”

“That’s how I used to toss ‘em,” Dean informed him. “You’d roll it up real tight and then aim and flip. It’s all in the wrist.”

Alec rubbed at his throbbing eye and nodded in appreciation for the demonstration. He was also pretty glad his uncle had aimed for his face. A childhood of doing drive bys with heavy projectiles had given the man a powerful overhand throw and Alec wasn‘t wearing much protective gear at the moment. But his good mood suddenly returned when he recalled another one of his short-term freelance professions.

It was a very brief job and it had been just after a particularly long and heavy night of drinking at Crash.

“I once got some money from this old guy sitting in a cab waiting at a light?”

Dean blinked at him uncertainly.

“He gave me twenty dollars to flash my junk. He gave Cindy a hundred just to see her tits but you know how it is,” Alec shrugged. “It’s a woman’s world. And hey! The next day I saw the guy on the news and it turned out he was the mayor.”

“Huh.”

“Does that count as bad?” Alec asked.

“Yup,” Dean picked up his coffee mug and headed back into the house. “You win.”

Alec broke out in another smile and took the precious heirloom sitting on the table. Having no pocket at the moment, he held it in his palm and watched the light sparkle on its grimy surface. He could use all the good luck he could get.

Especially the kind that ran in the family.


	12. Chapter 12

Sam tapped the touch pad on his laptop to keep the machine awake.

An entire morning had gone by while he sat around waiting for files to move and copy. It had been nice to sit back and watch the clouds out the window, but he sat up straighter when he heard Dean‘s footsteps come up the stairs. When his brother paused uncertainly outside the office door, Sam closed his eyes and decided to say something before he was left alone again.

But Dean beat him to the punch.

“You a got a minute, Sam?”

“Sure,” a real yawn came before he could fake one. “What’s up?”

“Have you been downstairs recently?”

“Yeah,” With a flash of guilt, Sam‘s hands slid off the keyboard. “Alec’s been pretty upset all morning.”

“Upset?” Dean raised his eyebrows. “The dude is crying. Like with tears and everything.”

"Oh." Sam honestly hadn't expected to hear that. “Still?”

“Like the dog we don’t own just got nailed by a truck.”

“H-He’s fine.“ When Sam tried he could feel the surges of his son’s grief ebb and flow like an electric current from one floor below. “He’ll be okay.”

“He slammed the door in my face! My own door by the way.”

“Alec was just… studying some stuff on the internet.”

“What the hell is on the internet?”

“Information.“ Sam scrubbed his hands over his face a few times before he decided to explain. “He downloaded the 1940s.”

“What?”

“Music. Movies. News. Everything.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“So what, he did all this … before breakfast?”

“He started last night,” Sam said. “He blew up the hard drives with the vintage porn alone. But I restored most of the research archives we had backed up on the server out in Des Moines.”

“Fantastic.“ Dean picked up a few books and tossed them aside to take a seat. “I didn’t even know you could download an entire decade.”

“I might have mentioned to him that Manticore censored his education on foreign conflicts,” Sam tried to keep his eyes on the busy laptop. “S-So he went a little overboard trying to fill in the gaps on the world wars.”

Dean breathed a laugh.

“What?” Sam wanted to laugh too. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing I guess,” Dean said. “Just never figured those guys would leave out something as fun as the Holocaust from the lesson plan.”

Sam opened another file of never ending back up. He’d plugged in three portable drives so far and he wasn’t even half way done. It was impossible to go through so many years worth of notes and scans quickly. Even when most of the data was outdated and irrelevant, he couldn’t bring himself to delete it into oblivion. It was as uselessly fascinating as olds letters or a childhood diary.

“Lots of hard work you‘ve got going on here,” Dean leaned down to squint at the screen. “Never know when you’ll need last year's daily newspapers. From uh… Columbus, Ohio.”

“I’ll be done with the state capitals tomorrow,” Sam said. “Maybe the day after.”

Dean cleared his throat. “You know it’s Wednesday, right?”

Glancing over at his brother, Sam did a quick mental check to make sure the date wasn’t something he was supposed to remember. He got an uneasy feeling as he studied the expectant look in Dean’s eyes and realized he didn’t have a clue. “Wednesday,” he shrugged. “All day long.”

“Yeah, it’s the anniversary of your ass being in the exact same chair for an entire week.”

It was a relief when Sam understood where this was going. It was nothing he hadn’t heard before and it was nothing he didn’t know how to explain away.

“Before you say ‘the church made me do it‘, don’t bother,” Dean told him. “And you can stow all the excuses you’ve been saving up.”

“Good,” Sam felt a flash of anger. “I didn’t really feel like reading the list anyway.”

“Don’t you get it yet, Sam?”

“I guess not,” He wasn’t sure if it was the all-nighter throwing him off or if his brother had gotten into the beer early. “What am I not getting?”

“Alec is downstairs using up all the tissues because you sent him to the freakin’ 1940s.”

“I-I didn’t send him anywhere. I told him that what he was taught might not be true. I told him to educate himself and make his own decisions based on facts and figures, not the opinions of a brainwashing government agency that--”

“You’re giving him errands. You’re sending him away. You’re ignoring him, Sam.”

Sam stared in startled offense.

“This bullshit was cute when you were on your own, but not anymore,” Dean said. “You don’t come first anymore and you never will again. Not even when it gets so bad you can’t even stand it. So shut your goddamn computer off and talk to your son.”

“Dean…” Sam vision blurred and he wished it was anger this time. “I-I’m… I’m not… I can‘t…”

“Ben fucked me up too,” Dean was the one that couldn’t look him in the eye this time. “I get it, okay? I get what he looked and sounded like. I was there.”

The cicadas buzzed outside in the lazy wave of the corn, the morning birds gone with the warm approach of the noon sun. And every meticulous and distracting thought Sam had been kept in place over the pain began to crumble. It rushed in like cold water, suffocating him and crushing him under its weight. He had forgotten how good at this he was. Letting it all build up until it all came crashing down at once…

“He was ours too, Dean,” Sam said. “No matter how he came into the world, he was ours.”

“I know,” Dean stood up. “But you got to let it go.”

“How?” As the word left his mouth, Sam realized how badly he hoped his brother could answer. “How do I do that?”

“Pack your crap, Sammy,” Dean said. “We leave in an hour.”

“W-What?” Sam watched his brother snap the laptop closed. “Where are we going?”

“Something out there is eating all our nation’s hikers and that‘s just not right.”

Sam blinked in confusion until he understood what was going on. “Dean, that wasn’t a real job. That was just--”

“Yeah, I know what it was and it’s the only good idea you’ve had in a long time.”

Sam shut his eyes when his brother’s hand settled on his shoulder. And suddenly everything left he had been holding onto broke free, sinking through him as he allowed his forehead to rest against Dean’s hip. It felt right to finally permit it to come, burning in his eyes and catching raw in the back of his throat. Growing white hot, he let it tumble, working loose and shaking through his body wave after wave. He could feel Alec nearby. His son’s sorrow stilling like a flame sheltered in his hands when Sam reached him, Dean’s grip tightening as if maybe he could feel it too.

It had been a while since Sam had watched the world go by from the passenger seat, but he decided his brother was absolutely right.

Hitting the road sounded like an excellent idea.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Alec POV. Tiny mini-series inside the ripples. The Winchesters go on a camping hunt and Alec is forced to assess the most vulnerable member of his new unit._

It was about 800,000 acres of thick pine forest, towering granite cliffs, green meadows and lots of mountains. Although an average of over 3 million people waltzed in and out of the national park a year, very few of that number did the truly hardcore stuff.

Like leaving their cars.

“Hey, Dean? We can‘t just leave food out everywhere or bears will smell it. Then bears will come to eat it and then they’ll eat us too. That lady at the station said bears do that all the time.”

“I know, Alec,” Dean slammed the trunk closed. “I heard.”

“And hey Sam?” Alec said. “I think that tent needs to be another five feet thatta way. Like I told you the first time.”

“Five feet?” Sam spun the handle of the small hand axe. “I kinda already hammered in the spikes-”

“I know, let’s just move it an even six feet,” Alec said. “That way if you screw it up again or…or you know, if it’s wrong by a few inches it won’t matter so much. Hey! Do you want to use the laser level?”

“I think I got it,” Sam rolled the musty canvas back up. “Thanks.”

Sitting back on the hood of the car, Alec studied the park advisory for the hundredth time. It looked and read like a newspaper, although an extremely boring one. Along with weather and other notices, it had any and all news that the park rangers on duty felt was pertinent to its visiting public. The hottest news flash around these parts was a mass blooming of some stupidly rare wildflower that’d blown in from Asia and started growing all over where it shouldn‘t be. On the very front page was a grainy picture of a happy family that had arrived a week ago to witness the lovely event.

“You think this really might be a job?” Alec asked. “Like one for us?”

“Could be quicksand for all we know,” Dean rattled through a box of pots and pans. “But while we’re here taking time off and everything?”

A savage animal attack was barely interesting for the woodsy locals and lost hikers were par for the course. However, the brand new camper van with shiny California plates found sitting abandoned in a ravine seemed to be pretty juicy gossip in these parts. Alec looked closer at the large photo of an adult female, adult male and three children under the age of six. They’d come to see some pretty scenery but instead they’d vanished without a trace.

“Man, you people don’t know what a real vacation is,” Alec envisioned a hotel sparkling on a beach. “This camping crap is more work than being at home. A-And Dean, I said all the food stuff goes over there, not with all the _medical_ stuff.”

“I heard you the first three times,” Dean added a small smile. “Sir.”

“If you heard me the first three times then it’d all be done already,“ Alec explained hopefully. “Are you beginning to see the problem here?”

“This is just like the good old days, huh Sammy?” Dean tossed a sleeping bag at his brother. “When we were kids we’d get to go to fun get-togethers out in the woods like this all the time. Counting stars. All the roasted hotdogs we could eat. The never ending conspiracy theory. All that’s missing is a bunch of drunk survivalists on Harley Davidson’s throwing beer bottles at us.”

“Yeah,” Sam smiled fondly. “Dad had a lot of friends back then.”

“Okay, lemme get this straight, Alec,” Dean refocused his attention on the heaps of their equipment scattered all over the ground. “You want us to keep the kerosene about 100 feet from all our fuel accelerants. And all the guns, rifles, and blades on the tarps look real nice, but uh, any passing park police is gonna be on top of us like a stripper on our birthday.”

“It’s just for inventory,” Alec said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Who’s worried?” Dean tossed another machete onto the pile.

The spot Alec had picked to set up was right on the edge of a large lake that mirrored the sunset right up to their very own strip of sandy shore. It gave them a degree of privacy away from the gigantic trailers that lined the paved road a few miles away, and a view that Alec liked of the mountains rising up along the horizon.

“What about this?” Sam picked up the pieces of the radio scanner. “Maybe I’ll just set up this up in case-”

“No!” Alec didn’t mean to raise his voice that loudly. “T-That radio requires a lithium battery and I uh, I haven’t found where I packed those yet.”

“It’s no problem,” Sam said. “It’s gotta be around here somewhere.”

“It’s cool!” Alec tried a smile again. “Just leave it. Leave it right where you found it. Next to radiation meds, extra radio transistors, and Bacardi Rum.”

“He’d got them all put together under Rs,” Dean took a seat at the picnic table constructed from rotting logs. “I think.”

Alec’s patience ran out. “Look, just because we’re in the middle of freaking nowhere with no lights or anything of interest whatsoever-”

“Don‘t forget no television,“ Sam said. “Or telephones.”

“I-It doesn’t mean we should let everything get unorganized,” Alec finished. “Civilization requires structure. It‘s what separates humans from the animals.” He took a deep breath of that fresh mountain air everyone liked to sing all those corny songs about. It really had been almost six-hours since their arrival and he hadn’t ONCE thought about what the internet might be doing without him.

Well, he hadn’t been thinking about it until now. And now again because he started thinking about it again and again-

Damn it.

Sam was dropping large mismatched rocks into a circle by the pile of firewood.

“And you’ll be wanting to put that fire pit about ten more feet away from the tent,” Alec informed him. “Fifteen if you really want to get technical, but we’re on a downward cant of about .03 degrees so I think with the winds it should be-” he paused to slap at a particularly large moth flapping at his ear. He stared down at the dusty insect remains of what looked to be the size of a small bird. “Oh... man.”

“Hey, I think I recognize that guy!” Dean pointed. “I remember seeing an E!Hollywood special about how he played a stunt double back in the 60s when Mothra was getting too strung out on coke to do any of his own action scenes anymore-”

“That’s obviously not true and I’m trying to stay really hungry.” Alec leaned back to see the broad shell of an enormous roach-like beetle scurrying quickly up the back of his bare thigh and headed for the haven of his camouflage shorts. “What the f-”

“You can eat those things you know,” Sam added from the 9-foot non-regulation fire pit. “They have more protein than a hotdog.”

“Yeah,” Alec felt his stomach growl. “Everyone keeps bringin’ up hotdogs but I don’t see anyone cooking any- aw, crap!” Sam and Dean looked at him and Alec looked at the large lake filled with crystal clear and undoubtedly polluted water. “I-I kind of forgot to fill the water jugs when we were at that service station.”

“Guess we gotta take a drive,” Dean jangled the keys. “Anyone wanna come?”

Alec didn’t particularly feel like going on water detail but Sam was already headed for the car. With a sigh, he realized he didn’t want to sit around an empty camp ground by himself either.

“Shot gun!” he tried.

He could have physically stopped his dad from taking the front passenger side, but being pushed by your face into the backseat spoke louder than any type of command. And besides, with all the stuff unpacked out of the car, he could stretch out and catch a few Zs on the comfort of padded vinyl. Alec figured he might as well try to get some in now.

There was a long night waiting ahead with nothing but a layer of nylon between him and the nationally cherished rocks.

 

 

 

 

The bustling park station they had stopped at hours earlier was oddly empty. All the campers, backpackers and rangers were nowhere to be seen. Even the ancient dog that had been lounging on the packed dirt driveway was gone.

“Someone havin’ a party?” Dean glanced up at the brightly lit welcome sign. “We never get invited to anything.”

Alec followed closely behind, glancing over his shoulder at the quiet road. For some reason all the dark woods and lack of traffic was making his skin prickle. The building was more like a shack equipped with a well, but it was the only one around for miles. Earlier that day they’d paid a friendly woman inside for the privilege of a camping spot, some provisions and got some free advice about the local grizzly bears.

“I’m surprised this place is still open,” Sam walked up the plank steps. “It’s pretty late.”

“Let’s just get some water so we can make dinner,” Dean said. “We should grab the maps that Alec was supposed to buy too.”

X5-494 had always been taught to be hyper-aware of his unit’s strengths and weaknesses. When he wasn’t assigned as group leader, he’d usually ended up with the responsibility whether he wanted it or not. In fact, when Manticore had first started sending its young soldiers into combat duty the X5 casualty rate was so appallingly high that a very unfunny joke began to circulate amongst the medical staff. It seemed that with all that officer education in the classrooms, their kids were too busy doing it by the book to notice when they should’ve been hitting the dirt.

But Alec never got caught off guard by all those stupid rookie mistakes. It was his uncanny ability to survive in just about every situation that had made him one of Manticore’s favorite playing pieces to put on the field.

He was still secretly proud of the distinction even if it came from the men who had treated him like disposal property.

“Hello!” Sam called out over the counter. “Anyone here?”

Alec's distracted gaze suddenly fell on a sloppy bouquet of flowers sitting on the counter in a rusted coffee can. The plants were a strange color of blue not often seen in nature. He realized someone had picked a handful of those exotic wildflowers those missing tourists and everybody else had driven in for the weekend to take a look at. Alec didn’t think the plants were all that mind-blowingly beautiful to behold either. The things were a pile of glossy thick petals, slick wet stems and smelled like ass.

“Terrain maps,” Dean was at the rack by the postcards. “They have some from all over.”

Nodding in approval, Alec watched his uncle collect all ten for the area.

Alec’s new unit was small, three men including himself, and as a solider he had long ago accessed exactly what they were capable of. It was one of the many reasons he had been able to keep himself alive for so long in Manticore's ranks. He always knew what the people he depended on could and could not do. This unit actually had a high capacity for effectiveness even considering the group comprised of two Ordinaries and only one X5. Alec, as he already knew, was awesome in a fight and so was his father. After all, Sam was a powerful psychic that the scientists of Manticore had specifically chosen as one of the templates to build their super soldiers. A power that had been passed onto Alec and when used in conjunction with one another, could do as much damage as high gauge explosives.

And then there was Dean.

Alec sighed.

For all Dean's training and weaponry expertise, Alec had to deem him as definitely the weakest on their front. Dean didn’t have an X5’s durable physicality or the lethal battery in his brain that could inflict the same damage with pure thought alone. But his uncle never seemed all that worried about the fact that he was a unit liability either.

“Got it,” Dean flashed them a smile. “Let’s go.”

“What?” Alec blinked. “You got what?”

“A notice from the ranger,” Dean held up a piece of paper he apparently picked out of the trash. “The water pump here is broke and here's the directions to the nearest working one.”

“I see.” Alec would have never had seen that crumpled notice sitting in the garbage in a million years. “G-Good job.“ He quickly reassessed his uncle’s overall utility, and got ready to just shut up and do what he was told until he had a plate with hotdogs on it.

Something made him pause.

“What’s a matter, Alec?” Sam was leaving some cash on register for the maps. “Thought you were hungry?”

“I-I am.” But the smell of those weird flowers on the counter were making his stomach churn. They didn’t just smell like ass, they smelled a lot more like something that had just curled up and died in one. Shrugging off the headache the heavy pollen was starting to give him, Alec decided to get back out into all that fresh air they were wasting. “But-But why do you guys think they'd leave this store wide open? I mean I get we’re in the country with all the nice people but no one trusts anyone this much.”

“Dunno,” Dean shrugged. “Maybe they went to get some water too.”

“Speaking of which,“ Sam asked. “Where is it?”

“Where else?” Dean sighed. “Back by the lake.”

So all this way for nothing. Alec almost doubled over with force of his hunger pangs.

“Don’t panic,” Dean said. “I’ll drop you guys off and go find it myself.”

Alec was actually more worried about proper dog prep that he was sure required H2O.

“Just thaw the dudes on a stick, Alec. It works great.”

“Oh.”

“And you better save me at least six of ‘em,” Dean told him. “With the buns attached.”

As they loaded back into the car, Alec noticed a sliver of the moon had risen over the pine trees. And he suddenly felt more than uneasy about sending the most vulnerable member of his unit alone into the woods on water detail. Especially when he knew it was something he had been taught not to do all his life to assure team safety. It was a lesson he’d been trained to adhere to since he’d learned how to walk and would have been punished severely for ignoring. But something stopped the thought from leaving his mouth before he could say it out loud.

This wasn’t Manticore and they weren’t in a combat zone.

Separating from the group to perform necessary functions was something normal people did and he had to get used to it. Slumping back in his seat, Alec listened to his father and uncle discuss what hour dawn would arrive and where they should take their first investigative nature walk. By then they’d have all the water figured out and Alec wouldn’t have to let either one of them out of his sight until they finished this tedious vacation and headed home.

Until then, he might as well try and enjoy all the wild flowers just like everyone else.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Alec POV. Tiny mini-series inside the ripples. The Winchesters go on a camping hunt (and Alec is forced to assess the most vulnerable member of his new unit) spend time with his dad._

Alec didn’t want to leave the meager envelope of warmth he’d spent all night amassing in his sleeping bag.

Camping was a more chilly endeavor than he recalled it being.

Rubbing at his eyes, he thought about the uncomfortable night spent waking and dreaming vivid dreams. Bits and pieces of all the military maneuvers he’d been marched through as a child had come back in pictures and flashes deep in a frigid Wyoming winter. Gray skies and endless miles of untouched white. Stretching the length of the tent, he smiled a little at what being cold really meant. Six feet of snow outside and all your drinking water turned to hard clear ice--

“Dean?” Alec rasped.

He suddenly remembered his sleepy vigil by the campfire being interrupted by his father telling him to turn in. There was another hazy expanse of time as he had flipped around in the nylon bag until he drifted off still waiting for the sound of the car engine to return. Sitting up slowly, he could see in the fluttering shadows of dawn that Sam was the only other person with him in the cramped tent.

Staying in the bag, he unzipped the door flap and took a look around the site.

The fire was out and the gravel parking area was empty.

“Shit.”

 

 

 

 

The walk was nice.

After a box of granola bars and a cantaloupe Alec didn’t mind a quick submergence in the icy lake to get started. Sam stayed dry on the shore and just doubled up on his flannel. They shared a bottle of water that they’d taken from the car the night before and followed the road north where the ranger’s notice had indicated a working pump.

“Maybe the car broke down,” Alec liked the way the sunrise glittered over the lake. “Or maybe he met someone. Maybe he found that party everyone went to.”

“Maybe.”

Sam walked steady and fast, his stride an effort to match even when Alec was trying.

“I had these dreams last night,” Alec breathed a laugh. “Man, they were so weird.”

“Dreams?” Sam paused to look at him. “You had dreams?”

“No, no, nothing bad or anything. I guess it’s all this outdoorsy crap just getting to me. I was thinking about all the trips and stuff we did when I was a kid. L-Like Dean said right? You guys used to go camping with your dad all the time? I guess I did too. Except it was usually survival training and navigation exercises. Sometimes I really liked it when we got to go out there. It was just me and all these woods you know? And when the snow stopped falling everything would get so quiet you’d want to hold your breath so you wouldn’t make any noise. That sounds stupid doesn’t it? I mean, how do you interrupt a bunch of trees-”

“I know what you mean,” Sam said. “I shot my first deer on a morning like that.”

“Really?”

Walking with his head down and hands shoved in his pockets, Alec couldn’t see Sam’s face very well but the statement had surprised him. For some reason he hadn’t been expecting a heart warming memory about offing a dewy nosed Bambi. Not that he wasn’t opposed to eating delicious mammals of any kind, but his father didn’t seem like the type of guy that got off on nailing a 12-point buck and mounting its head on a wall.

“We lived in a cabin out in Oklahoma for a while,” Sam said. “We pretty much ate out of cans and whatever else happened to walk by.”

“Sounds fun,” Alec smiled again. “You guys talk about moving so much I never thought you stayed anywhere long enough to eat.”

“I was never much good at bringing home dinner though. My first deer was also my last deer.”

“Why‘s that?”

“Well,” Sam gave him a half smile back. “Shooting something from a distance and peeling the skin off it were two completely different… experiences.”

Alec felt a brief sensation of relief, his father’s admission inadvertently reassuring him about his own capacity for brutality. He’d kind of felt the same way when he’d been tossing his fists in a lit up ring and trying to maim people for cash. Or when he’d realized what his mind had done to their house and every window in it. There was a certain shame in using all your strength just because you could.

“I don’t like hurting anything either,” Alec shook the last inch of water in the bottle. “That sounds stupid too, I know but-”

“It’s not stupid, Alec. It’s rational.”

No one had ever called him rational before and it felt good. Like the sunlight warming off the lake and the solid presence of Sam glowing almost as brightly at his side. Alec gnawed at the inside of his mouth, another thought coming to him that he’d been hesitant to mention before.

“I tried before,” Alec said. “I uh, tried to find Dean you know, like I can find you? But I couldn’t hear anything besides the birds. It’s strange out here, like I can’t see anything past a few feet or something.”

“Yeah, I’m having the same trouble.”

Alec opened and shut his mouth. He thought his amateur skills were just fizzing out with all the wide open spaces but he figured his dad would have no problem at all. The nervousness he’d had since the night before came back, the easy feeling of a morning walk fading with each step. He wished a car would come by. A mini-van packed with screaming kids and some dork with a digital camera that could bring them down the road faster.

He was just about to suggest he blur on ahead when his dad suddenly pointed through the fringe of pine trees.

“There she is,” Sam’s paced picked up. “I can see the car.”

There was a clearing just off the road, a carved wooden sign erected for the campers to show the way to the outhouses and fresh water. Alec spotted the glisten of condensation on the black paint of the Chevy and knew it had been sitting there all night. Sam didn’t even walk towards it, instead heading for the metal hand pump in the distance and their two plastic water jugs laying on the ground.

“Dean!” Alec cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “Dean! You out here!”

Sam picked up one of the empty jugs and turned slowly in a circle to listen to the silent forest that surrounded them. “He’s not here,” he said. “No one is.”

Alec knew exactly what Sam meant and he agreed. There were no tracks in the wet grass from early morning hikers looking for water like there should have been. No other cars were parked by theirs and there were no voices by the bathrooms of excited tourists ready to start the day. Besides the subtle reek of the chemical toilets and the scent of tree sap, Alec couldn’t detect much else.

But there was one other familiar scent.

His gaze fell on the water pump, the packed dirt around it covered in weeds and overgrown grass. And there bobbing in the breeze was the heavy head of a glossy blue flower. More of them were growing in a clump on the other side of the path, the bloated blossoms weighing on the stalks and sagging into the soil.

“Man, these stink,” Alec backed up a step when the wind wafted their odor full on in his direction. “I don’t get why everyone is so hot to get a look at these things either. What’s so great about a flower that smells like road kill?” Turning when Sam didn’t answer, he saw his father was already a dozen yards away and walking into the thick grove of pines. “Hey, wait up!”

Alec almost had to start running to keep him in sight, pausing when he saw Sam had stopped at the bend in the trail. It wasn’t until he by his father’s side did he see what Sam had knelt down to look at.

“There are more down that way,” Sam was running his hands through the slick leaves of the flowers. “I’ve never smelled anything like them before.”

“Me neither,” Alec frowned. “You sure you wanna go touching it like that? The stench might not ever wash off.”

“Stench?” Sam held his hands to his face and inhaled. “It smells good. It smells like… I can’t explain it.”

Blinking in confusion, Alec watched as his father got to his feet and practically stumbled to the next patch of flowers growing nearby. “What? Are you serious? You… you like it?”

“Look, there’s more down there.”

“S-Sam, what are you doing?”

“It’ll just take a second, Alec. Can you believe how many of them there are? All the rain last week must have brought them out.”

“Yes, its all completely enchanting but can we sight see later?” Alec looked back towards the car. “Let’s drive back to that other service station. We can ask if Dean stopped by there again last night. Maybe they know something about where everyone is- Sam? Hey, are you listening to me?”

Sam had picked a hand full of the flowers and was absently crushing them in his fist as he searched the ground for more.

Alec hadn’t been paying much attention before but now that he was looking right at him it was impossible not to see. His father’s pupils were blown almost completely black, his chest was heaving and he’d broken out in a light sweat. Manticore’s Botany 101 class might not have included whatever species this funky flower was, but Alec knew the effects of an opiate when he saw one.

“Sam, put those down.”

“What?”

Finally putting two and two together, he knocked the bruised petals out of Sam’s hands and started to haul him back to cleaner air by the road.

“Alec, no, wait-” Sam tried to stop him. “I just want to go a little further, there are more… Alec… Alec, let me go…”

“Sure, no problem.” Ignoring the anger seeping into Sam’s voice, he just hoped he didn’t feel anything besides some physical resistance. With brute force he could make Sam do anything, but the guy had a few other defenses that Alec wasn‘t sure he could handle as well. “The lake looks real pretty doesn’t it? Let’s get closer and keep taking really deep breaths.”

Sam allowed himself to be pulled to the water’s edge, his gaze going back in frustration to the woods and the blue patches of the blooms.

“Sam? Can you just listen to me for a second?” Alec didn’t like how all the color in father’s eyes was almost gone. “It’s these flowers, okay? I smelled the pollen last night in that store but all it gave me was a headache. I think these plants might be releasing something into the air and it’s getting you high or something. Sam, are you listening to me?”

His father had yanked his arm out of Alec’s grip and was walking back determinedly towards the woods.

“Sam! No! Stop- angh!" Alec clutched his head when it hit. His father had flicked a lash of power backwards at him, sharp and precise, it had been just enough to disable him for a moment. Alec was nothing if not a quick learner. Copying what Sam had just done, he sent a ripple of power right back that made Sam fall down to one knee.

“Alec…”

He didn’t like the strange waver in Sam’s voice. But even though Sam sounded startled and scared, he staggered up to his feet and got right back to walking towards those damn flowers again. Not knowing quite what else to do, Alec decided fast what it might take to really clear his father’s head. Skipping all polite requests and gentle persuasion, Alec grabbed Sam by the arms and dragged him back to the lake’s edge. Forcing them into the icy shallows, he got to his knees and brought Sam down with him.

“Sorry about this but…well, you‘ll thank me later,” Alec firmed his grip on the back of Sam’s neck. “I hope.”

Alec dunked Sam’s head under the water for a few seconds before letting him come back up for air. He did it again a couple more times before he understood Sam was loudly swearing and telling him to stop. When he determined it wasn’t a zoned out zombie stream of incoherency, he finally halted the timed immersions. Realizing he was panting for breath himself, he anxiously studied Sam’s face for signs of lucidity. Ice cold water didn’t cure much, but Alec knew it did wonders for perspective.

“Wha- What the hell happened?” Sam gasped.

“I dunno,“ Alec let go and sat back limply in the water. Wiping a shaking hand across his eyes, he looked back at the woods and the trail of flowers that lead into the forest. “But I think I know where Dean might have gone.”

“Those plants,“ Sam groaned and dragged wet hair out of his eyes. “I.. I don’t feel so great.”

“You don’t look so great.”

“You have to get into the trunk, Alec. We need some stuff.”

Getting unsteadily to a stand, he was already trying to figure out how break into the car without ruining the paint job.

“Find my dad’s journal,” Sam rubbed some more water over his face. “L-Let’s see if he ever recorded anything about the horticulture around here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And please… be careful.”

“I don’t think those flowers do anything to me,” Alec assured him. “Besides make me want to puke.”

“Good.”

“Alec?”

Stopping himself again, he waited impatiently for his father to slowly gather his thoughts.

“Bring a few pistols back, too,” Sam said quietly. “And the shot guns.”

“Y-Yes, sir.”

Running back over the road, Alec knew the weapons weren’t for a bunch of gnarly plants. His thoughts flashed to the missing family on the park bulletin and the empty station they’d visited the night before. He knew his father probably wasn’t real worried about the flowers either.

But people were a whole different story.


	15. Chapter 15

Loaded down with a duffel and shotguns, Alec was checking for anything he’d missed when he saw Sam coming back his way across the dirt road.

“What are you doing?” Alec held up his hands. “Not a good idea, Sam! I think we should wait until-”

“Until what?” Sam asked. “The water helped and we have to keep going. Bring all that stuff over to the pump. We‘ve got five minutes to do some research.”

Studying Sam’s eyes, Alec wondered if the bio-warfare immunities that Manticore bragged about installing into their X5s were actually ever conceived in any laboratory. Monitoring his father’s normalizing respiration made him consider that perhaps a transgenic’s resistance to chemicals might be something completely natural. Well, as close to natural that simple demon genetics could be.

“I got the journal,” Alec said. “I can read the whole thing real quick if you can help me out with some of the handwriting.”

From the look on his father’s face, he could tell that Sam wasn’t interested in wasting any time now that Dean was officially missing.

“Look towards the back,” Sam fell into a kneel under the water pump and let the stream soak him to the waist. “It’s where most of the flora is listed.”

“I already found it. It says in here that these things aren’t even flowers,” Alec flipped a page. “Says it’s a fungus.”

“Are you sure you got the right plant?”

“Yeah, your dad colored in the sketches, see?” Alec held up the leather bound journal. “It’s the exact same shade of blue and everything. Look, he even put in a cross section of the root system. Was he an artist or something?”

“What? No. So… so how’s it work?“

“Skin contact,” Alec had already figured that one out on his own. Sam for example had been doing fine until he started picking the fungus flowers up and rubbing the damn things all over his face. “It introduces narcotic alkaloids into the bloodstream. You know, like morphine, or opium or heroin.”

“What does it want?”

“Huh?“ Alec was distracted by another picture his grandfather had rendered of a Venus Flytrap. Taking up half a page, it had been carefully labeled with dimensions which would have made it as tall and wide as a bulldozer. “W-What does who want?”

“The fungus.”

“It’s a fungus,” Alec shrugged. “So I guess it wants dark places and water? These notes don’t say anything else besides that it shows up around here about once a decade and it doesn’t last long. They die out almost as fast as they sprout.”

“So this is just a natural phenomena?” Sam shook wet hair from his eyes and regarded the blooms under the pump warily. “Its intentions are that is has no intentions?”

“I guess,“ Alec snapped the journal closed. “Pretty weird though. If all it does is get you high then why aren’t there a bunch of happy campers laying around being high? It’s like they all put down what they were doing and just… ”

“Walked into the woods,” Sam stood up. “We’ve got to follow that trail, Alec.”

“I’ll go.”

“We’re both going.”

Sam swayed a couple of times before he looked like he was ready to walk in a straight line, and Alec knew his dad wasn’t going to admit it but the man was having some trouble with his eyesight too. Thinking fast, Alec decided to try to get his own way by poising his demand in the guise of a reasonable idea. He’d witnessed Logan perform the trick on Max plenty of times and it worked like an honest to God magic charm.

“Hey, Sam? I just thought of something,” Alec pretended to ponder the sky. “What if Dean comes back this way and none of us are around? He could be hurt. I think one of us should stay here with one of the radios. I’ll go and hit the trail on my own and we’ll keep in contact that way instead of-”

“No,” Sam said firmly. “Lead the way. We got to be fast but don‘t get too far ahead of me. You got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

With a sigh, Alec hefted a duffel onto one shoulder and the shotgun over the other. Sticking to the center of the trail, he tried not to look at the blue plants gathered along its edges. It was either his imagination or the things were reeking even worse than they had been before. The notes he’d just read did mention that the things had a fairly short lifespan. Maybe when they began to decay they started spewing the last of their putrid spores into the air. He cast a worried glance over at Sam to reassure himself that his father wasn’t about to succumb to any more groovy acid trips.

“The map says this ridge empties out by a river,” Sam looked pale but his eyes were the right color. “I think that’s the way we should go.”

Alec did what he was told and lead the way.

 

 

 

 

A shifting forest path of towering pines and granite boulders all started to look the same after a while. Alec’s innate sense of direction and the map brought them back onto the overgrown trail more than once. And when that failed, the blue fungus was a better compass to follow than any means they had on hand anyway.

The air got cooler but Alec’s clothes got damp with sweat.

After several hours had passed they arrived at the edge of the ridge, the way abruptly turning steep and slippery, thick with trees that hid the sight of the roaring river flowing somewhere below. But under the scent of the conifers and mud, Alec could detect another distinct scent hanging in the chilly humid air. He knew exactly where the smell was coming from long before Sam announced what was marked on the terrain map directly ahead.

The smell was dank, wet, clammy, and all the things a good little fungus liked the most.

It was a cave.

Alec studied the black slit that made the entrance to the hole in the ground. Half hidden by roots growing through the rock and flanked by more blue flowers, it would be easy to walk right by it and never notice it was there. The opening was so small that Alec knew he’d have to get on his hands and knees and push his gear ahead just to squeeze in. And there was no telling how far back it went or how deep it got either.

“There’s a network of caverns that go up and down the river for a few miles,” Sam folded the map closed. “The larger caves are further south, but these-”

“Aren’t comfortable enough for the tourists?”

“Suppose not,” Sam kicked at the churned soil under their boots. “Lots of tracks around here.”

“Looks like a lot of people have gone in there,” Alec gnawed at the inside of his mouth. “Must be a lot bigger on the inside than it looks, huh?”

Sam tested a flashlight before tossing it to Alec. Pulling out one for himself, Sam leaned down to shine the beam into the cave. A gush of frigid air breathed into their faces as the stark light revealed the narrow passage. Alec could see that it got wider a few yards in but not much else besides that. Unzipping his bag, he got prepared to leave behind what he didn’t need and keep what he did. He was about to bring up the usefulness of the shotguns when he caught a flash of something just a few feet into the trees on the forest floor.

Realizing what it was, he dropped his bag to the ground.

“Alec?” Sam was right behind him, cautious and alert. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Kneeling down slowly, Alec crawled forward to brush away the dirt and leaves that were covering the glint of metal. It was the mother of pearl handled pistol that his uncle carried with him everywhere. Picking up the weapon, Alec felt a rush of the fear that he‘d been trying real hard to keep under control ever since they found the abandoned Chevy.

“I guess he came this way,” Alec glanced back at the cave. “A-At least we know we’re on the right track, right?” The grip on the gun tightened until his hand started to shake.

“Alec, it’ll be okay. We’re gonna find him.”

“We should have never split up.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not.”

An automatic and urgent need to get up and properly stand at attention like he’d been trained overwhelmed him. Kneeling in the dirt while his father waited for an answer suddenly felt like every time he had ever had to face a superior and explain how he’d failed. The sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach went into a sickening freefall as he also realized his brain and body still expected a punishment for such failure. But instead of physical torture, or the dark and silent agony of confinement, Alec was sure his father’s regret for ever having trust in him would be far worse.

“It’s not okay, Sam. It’s just not.”

“I don’t understand.”

Alec squeezed his eyes shut, the soft questioning touch on his shoulder making his jaw clench and teeth grind. This situation was completely due to Alec’s idiotic oversight. Every time he’d ever hunted alone with Dean he always made sure to keep his uncle in his line of sight. He made sure the odds were in their favor no matter how odd their odds tended to be. The misery at failing his family in this ridiculously simple task of protection shot through him, queasy and horrible like the endless injections the medics administered to the disobedient in the locked wards of PSY-OPS.

“Alec?” Sam’s voice mirrored Alec's distress. “Please?”

“Dean’s a normal person,” Alec said quietly. “And normal people aren’t like us. They’re weak. It‘s my duty to make sure… my unit depends on my ability to…”

Sam's silence encouraged him to continue.

“So I-I shouldn’t have let Dean go without me,” he said. “I should have gone with him and made sure that everything was all right.”

Kneeling behind him, Sam pushed his fingers through Alec’s hair and gently tugged at it. “If I had a dime for every time I said that about my brother,” he breathed a laugh. “I uh, I’d have a lot of dimes.”

“You don’t get it.”

“I think I do,” Sam said. “I think you know a lot about the weight of responsibility because you know how easy it is to abuse it.”

“Y-You aren’t mad at me?”

“Alec, you haven’t survived everything you have just because you can put your fist through a brick wall,” Sam said. “Or because you can run fast. Or never miss a bullseye. Or… or any of the things you can do. I want you to understand that.”

Anxiously searching Sam’s face for anger, Alec wanted badly to be able to tell his father that he did understand. But with a growing dread he knew he had absolutely no idea what Sam wanted him to see. And Alec knew whatever dumb look he must have had on his face conveyed his confusion as clearly as if he’d said it out loud. Allowing himself to be helped to his feet, Alec was still waiting for Sam’s dissatisfaction with him to surface along with whichever form of reprimand that would follow. But instead of retribution, Alec was surprised by the graze of a knuckle that ran down his cheek and nudged him in the jaw.

“I don’t expect you to understand that right now,” Sam told him with a small smile. “But you will. One day, I promise you will. Okay?”

Alec blinked hard and fast until he knew it would be okay to talk again without sounding funny. “But-But being perfect doesn’t hurt tho either, huh?” Alec tried smiling. “I mean, without my immunities you’d still be playing with flowers in a puddle of your own drool.”

“Yeah, yeah. Point taken.” Sam pushed him forward. “And you and your eagle eyes get to go into the cave first.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Sam decided fast to confess. “I can’t see very well.”

“I knew it.” Alec frowned. “How bad is it?”

“Anything past a couple feet is blurry.”

“Crap.”

“It’s okay,” Sam said. “It’s gonna get real dark in there and I want you to use your head a lot more than your eyes, okay?”

Alec knew that didn’t mean his awesome IQ. And his head hadn’t been working really well out here with all the funky fungi interference, but it still worked when Alec pushed it. He proved his point by experimentally breaking into the thoughts of the only other person present. Sam gave him a sharp pained look as their collective mind was turned upside down and mixed like a blender short circuiting. But just as Alec was about to get a real bitch of a headache, Sam helped Alec extract himself and settle to the relative calm of a shared space that existed between them.

With some guilt, Alec realized he’d been avoiding his fathers thoughts all morning because he was afraid of what he‘d find.

But it was a breathless relief to not find a great black wash of disappointment he thought for sure would be there with his name all over it. In fact, there was nothing there like it. All Alec could feel was unease for what lay ahead. Apprehension for Dean. Worry for all the people who had crawled on their bellies into the maze of these caves.

Alec shone the flashlight in front of him as he moved carefully into the cramped space of the cavern. The images of the missing family with the small children stuttered through his concentration as Sam thought of them, and Alec quickly pushed them aside. He wasn’t going to get distracted now.

“This goes for about 6 yards then turns off to the left,” Alec cocked Dean’s gun. “Stay close.”

There was going to be no messing up this time, because if there was one thing to thank Manticore for, it was that those crazy freaks taught him how to live through most any combat scenario. He was going to do this one by their code. No error. No excuses. No mercy for an opponent that held none for you.

And most importantly, no more stupid rookie mistakes.

As soon as they crawled past the first bend the dark was subtly lit up with a soft blue glow. Shifting the flashlight upwards, Alec caught the first glimpse of a dripping vaulted ceiling covered top to bottom with the bloated bodies of the plants. And it looked like there was no end of them in sight. It was kind of pretty if you were the type that appreciated slimy caves filled with hallucinogenic mold.

“Try not to touch any,” Sam said from behind him. “If you can.”

“Yeah,” Alec sighed. “You too.”


	16. Chapter 16

Alec smeared a glob of smashed fungi across the front of his shirt and tried not to dry heave.

It was pretty hard not to make a lot of physical contact with the crap sticking all over the cave floor, walls and ceiling. Glancing back at his miraculously clean father, he was glad Sam was a lot more agile when it came to crawling around in enclosed tight spaces coated in mind altering slime. It was rapidly becoming very clear that it was going to be very important that at least one of them remained sharp.

Or at least mostly sane.

“You okay back there?” As the cave deepened the temperature started to plummet, and the long walk through the woods hadn’t quite completely dried Alec’s damp clothes. “A-Are you maintaining lucidity?”

“Yeah. I’m great. Keep going.”

“I have an idea,” Alec said. “It's a method on how to tell if either one of us starts day trippin’ during our spelunk.”

“Method?”

“Yeah, I figured we can just talk. You know, have a perfectly logical and rational conversation?” Alec used his flashlight to whack a clump of fungi out of his way. “That way you can monitor me too.”

“Okay,” Sam conceded. “Just keep your voice down.”

Alec grinned in the dark. He was all about playing this one by soldier’s rules but thirty minutes of crawling through rank fungus had dulled his need for cautious silence.

“What can we talk about?” Alec wondered out loud. “Am I allowed to ask questions?”

“This isn’t truth or dare, Alec,” Sam mumbled. “Just ask whatever you want.”

“Sure thing.” Alec allowed his body to shiver like it wanted, his muscles making warmth as his core cooled below his above normal average. At least the reek of musty lake water covered up the stink of the fungi a little bit. Flashing his light upwards, he felt a measure of relief when he saw the tunnel finally widening enough to permit walking. It forced him to walk in an uncomfortable low crouch, but anything off his knees was good enough for him. “So, Sam? Who was the worst roommate you’ve ever had? Ever?”

“Never had one,” Sam answered from behind him. “Roomed with a guy for the first few weeks at school, but he dropped out. After that I never lived with anyone else besides Jess.”

Alec thought it was interesting that his father’s brother apparently didn’t fit into the category of ‘anyone‘. “I had lots of roommates. When we got older they took us out of the general barracks and assigned us to smaller units. I even had my own quarters a couple of times.”

“Did you like it?”

“No.” Alec thought about it. “Yes? I don’t know. Sometimes.”

“So?” Sam prompted. “Who was the worst roommate you ever had?”

“628.”

“Sounds like a nice enough guy.”

“That whole series were all a bunch of jerk offs,” Alec checked the small ledge under him to make sure he was jumping down two feet and not two hundred. “I got stuck with him and his twin for an entire month. The lab bred the 62s for heavy combat duty but they screwed them all up in the head. Barely any pain receptors left so they bled all over the place all the time.”

Sam was quiet behind him, the noise of the rocks and dirt sliding under their boots sounding flat and oddly far away in the dark. Realizing that the story wasn’t all that amusing, Alec suddenly remembered why he wanted to tell it in the first place.

“And they couldn’t talk,” Alec said. “They were built mute.”

“Sounds quiet.”

“They could talk to each other though,” Alec sighed in annoyance. “All day and night, they had these hand signs I could never figure out. And they‘d change the code all the time so I would never know what the hell they were saying!”

“Sounds rude.

“I told you,” Alec shook his head. “Total jerk offs.”

“Did you have friends?”

Alec’s thoughts flashed to the rainy streets of the city and a broken down Mexican restaurant that Cindy liked go after work. All you could eat and drink for the spare change in your pocket. “Not like out here,” he smiled a little. “What about you?”

“What about what?”

“Do you have… friends?” Alec realized it was a stupid question, but he found himself unsure of what the answer might be. “Besides Bobby and Jim?”

“Yeah, I got a few left,” Sam said. “Despite all my best efforts.”

Wondering if Dean fit into that category too, Alec paused when he felt a shift in the smothering air. The tunnel abruptly widened until his flashlight was unable to catch the edges of it on either side. Knowing they’d arrived into a much larger and open space, his father elbowed up beside him to shine his flashlight down into the indeterminable size of the cavern below.

“Can you hear anybody?” Alec whispered. “I can’t.”

“Wait,” Sam’s lowered his voice too. “Switch your light off.”

The bio-luminescence that lit the dark rippled like ocean plants in the push and pull of an undersea current. The grotto spiraled above them, and swept off in two directions as the cave divided into two different passageways that both led deeper down.

“Is it just me,” Alec asked. “Or are these things getting bigger?”

“Looks like we’ll have to split up after all,” Sam said. “You take the left and you shout if you find anything. Otherwise we meet back here in exactly twenty minutes.”

Alec wiped some blue slime off his watch.

“Exactly twenty minutes, Alec.”

“Got it.”

He watched Sam carefully negotiate the slick rocks that led down the tunnel, and the flashlight dim and flicker from view off the wet walls. Left alone with his own tunnel to explore, Alec scratched at the fungi slime drying on his exposed arms. He was starting to feel a little dizzy but nothing he was really all that concerned about. If this stuff hadn’t made him feel like the Lizard King by now he still had a ways to go before he started going stark raving crazy. But he knew even his resistance wasn’t going to last forever. Sliding down the passage he quickly found the short reconnaissance mission to be even shorter than expected. After only a dozen yards he met a solid wall of rock that ended the trip. Climbing back up the way he came he decided not to waste precious minutes sitting in the dark and waiting around.

To help make up his mind, the fungi covering the cavern ceiling started to glow brighter, the ripples in their light becoming agitated. Looking straight up Alec felt something like a raindrop land on his face. Then another and another and another…

“Great,” Alec spit out a mouthful of fungi juice. “They’re leaking.”

Quickly following the tunnel Sam had taken, he was immediately glad its shelter took him out from the shower of rancid fluid. Feeling a little queasy, he swallowed the strange taste that was still burning gently in his mouth.

“Sam!” Alec called out. “Sam, I’m coming!”

His voice was eaten up by the dark, not even an echo of return. But he knew his father couldn’t have gotten too far away in such little time. He’d catch up and then they’d figure out what they next step would be. Moving more carefully, Alec kept expecting something to appear in the sweep of his flashlight that wasn’t made of stone or plant. A lot of people had walked into these caves and when Alec tuned his mind to listen he couldn’t hear a single one of them.

Alec stopped when he turned the corner. Just ahead the air changed from cool and damp, to sour and thick. The further he moved down the tunnel the more it smelled like a killing field in a war zone. A place were bodies had been left to putrefy because there was no place or time to bury them. With an uneasy sigh, he remade the grip he had on Dean’s gun and got himself going again. Looked like he’d finally found that party everyone had been talking about.

And it was packed.

 

 

 

 

At first he wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

Besides the fact that he could smell something else besides the fungus now. He had compared the plant’s scent to rotting flesh since he’d first gotten a whiff of the stuff, but now with actual corpses somewhere present he realized there was a subtle but distinct difference.

“Sam!” Alec tried again. “Sam, are you in here?”

The cavern had opened out into another large space again and this time it was curiously flat and as immense as a football field. He shouldn’t have been able to make out its size but there was enough ambient light in the chamber for him to see all the way across the other side and back again. And the dim light looked like it was coming from an underground lake. It was glowing blue like a night time swimming pool overloaded with too much chlorine. But it was just filled with the plants, immersed in the water and fluttering their gentle light and rippling strange patterns over the walls and ceiling. As he stepped closer, he saw these plants differed even more from the larger ones he‘d seen above. They lay in giant and bizarre shapes that made no logical sense. Kneeling down at the lake’s edge, he peered down into the glimmer of the water and slowly realized why he could smell the corpses but still hadn’t seen any.

There were bodies in there. Hundreds of bodies. Some definitely human and some assuredly animal. The fungus had grown and attached to them, deforming their limbs and dimensions like barnacles did to an unmoving object. Crusting over its host and inundating it with its roots and thick vines, the large still pool shuddered with soft light as Alec stumbled back away from it.

He knew way better than to lose his nerve. He also knew better than to be scared of a bunch of stiffs. But his equilibrium lurched alarmingly to one side, forcing him to grasp at the slick stone floor until the ground stopped swaying. Those stupid flowers were finally getting to him. And he couldn’t help himself from calling out for his father in a way that he hoped Sam could actually hear.

 _Sam?_ Alec clutched at his head as a pain burned through his temples with the effort. _I found something bad, Sam. I found people. I think they are the people that might have gone missing. Lots and lots of people-_

It was hard not to stare at the hypnotic stutter and flow of the lights in the water. Alec tried to concentrate on contacting Sam again, but instead he took a step closer to the lake. Small waves lapped on its shore and soaked his boots, the water was just a few degrees above freezing. It numbed his legs so quickly that he stumbled after a few steps and landed hard on his knees.

Alec gasped when his hands met the gritty bottom, the water splashing up into his face and shocking him with how it tasted.

It tasted… good.

Looking down, he saw the slick soft form of one of the plants had slithered over his submersed hand. He watched in fascination as another one joined it. A stray thought wandered through his mind telling him that he should really add to the notes in the old journal. It was a pretty important detail that these fucking things could move on their own power. He watched another and another, joining and interlocking like starfish over his skin. Alec knew he was staring and he tried to stop, but it was so pretty…

The chemicals were burning full steam in his blood and his time had run out.

Something nudged him back towards reality. Under the haze he felt a sting of pain, something piercing his skin under the soft blue shapes on his hands. The fungus was biting into him, countless razor sharp teeth sinking into his flesh over and over again.

“Aw, shit…”

He tried to draw his arm away and immediately knew that was a mistake. One of the floating vines whipped out from the water and caught him right across the face. The force of it knocked him backwards, but instead of falling hard onto the rocky shore there was another curl of vine right behind him. Both his arms were suddenly wrapped in them, and as he weakly fought their sticky grip he realized that he was being slowly pulled under the water inch by inch.

“Sam!” Alec heard his real voice in a desperate echo off the cavern walls. “Sam, I think I’m in trouble…”

Struggling to keep his face above the water, Alec panicked when a vine curled around his throat continued to wrap around his face and cover his mouth. He shook his head from side to side as it worked its way in, squeezing its soft unyielding shape between his lips and teeth. Alec growled in disgust when he felt it spread over his tongue, easing backwards into his throat to start to choke him. Kicking backwards, he dully understood the glowing strands were all over him and he’d only managed to get himself stuck worse than if he hadn’t fought at all. The slick leaves on the vines sealed around his mouth and covered his eyes, and suddenly he really was choking as something began trickling down the back of his throat. With a fresh surge of fear, Alec knew the plant was delivering a strong dose of whatever it was that had lulled these people here. It wasn’t an airborne spore this time or particles clinging to his skin, but its chemical insides being siphoned directly into his system.

He felt the frigid water close over his head, but it was far away and detached. Blinded and wrapped in a tangle of the plants, he dimly understood that oxygen was being delivered along with whatever else was being forced down his throat.

Thrashing in the icy void of the water, he felt the vines constrict more tightly around his body until he ceased moving at all.

And for some reason, he couldn't bring himself to care.


	17. Chapter 17

Alec waited for the icy water to begin flooding his lungs, but the pain never came.

The crushing pressure of the vines looped around his body faded until nothing was left but the dull burn of their pull. Drifting blindly in the cold dark, he felt a distant sense of betrayal as his mind failed to kick back into gear and start thinking. But his system was so overwhelmed by the toxins that each and every primordial instinct to survive fizzled out one by one. He was floating in the middle of his head, listening to the deafening sound of the trapped inhale and exhale of his ragged breathing. He tried to concentrate on it when all his mind wanted was to dim and fade, but then he realized he could hear other things too.

Out there in the dark was a heart beating.

When he listened closely he could hear lots of them. They were slow but they were steady as a room crowded with wind up clocks. Alec faintly felt his body twist and jerk in agitation. He hated those kinds of machines. Methodically loud contraptions that forced his brain to monitor their ticks and tocks no matter how hard he wanted to ignore it. And this racket was all around and everywhere, hanging in the black above and below him. There was a subtle torture in waiting for each soft _lub dub_ and anticipating the next. Alec’s heart was the loudest of all of them, quicker too, thudding in his chest so hard it felt like a hammer trying to break through his ribcage.

But something was changing in the void.

The noises in the dark were abruptly gone and replaced with a shrill sensation down his spine as his body painfully struck the ground. Alec began to feel more and more, the grit of sand under his fingertips and a violent shudder as his skin became sensitive to temperature again. He had no idea how it had happened but he was out of the water.

_Alec?_

The human voice was barely audible but he knew he was hearing it. First with his head and then with his ears, it blurred through his skull until he understood that someone was asking him questions.

_Can you hear me? It‘s me. Alec, can you hear me?_ I’m gonna get you out of here.” 

It was getting clearer and clearer. 

Reaching out desperately with his mind, he grabbed at the words but his father wasn‘t the man speaking to him. It was his uncle. There was the distinct feel of the vines around him sagging at the touch of something that grazed and burned Alec‘s skin underneath. 

Dean was cutting him free. 

“Are you still with me, dude?” 

Alec tried to nod but he couldn’t. Instead he tried to groan an affirmative and only heard it muffled inside his own head. He could feel the slick grip of the plants on his skin, wrapped in layers around his face, arms and legs. The sickening soft touch made him aware again of the same gentle pressure pressing on his tongue and down his throat. 

All that panic he’d been missing out on suddenly made a surprise reappearance. 

“Whoa! Easy Alec, don’t fight it! It only makes this shit worse.” 

Alec struggled to obey, but still continued to grind his teeth down into the spongy mass filling his mouth. He didn’t even give a shit anymore if the plant was the only reason he was breathing, he kept grating his jaw until he tasted something sweet and sticky begin to leak over his tongue. His chest hitched as the airflow became thinner, his muscles igniting with adrenaline as his body finally decided to join the fight. 

“You got to stay still! These bastards are slippery!" 

He went motionless again, panting weakly as the air dwindled. 

“Hang in there, Alec.” 

As he tried to stay calm he started listening again and detected something strange, but not unexpected. 

It was that thing in the water. Not the flowers or the vines but the thing that had made them all. There was something enormous sitting at the bottom of the underground lake since probably the last ice age and when big furry elephants were still walking around. The monster that was feeding on tourists and wildlife didn’t even own a heart in the complex mass of its prehistoric biology, but Alec could still hear it anyway. Not really plant or an animal, the keen edge of its consciousness whispered from the pitch black bottom of the lake as Dean plunged the knife through the vines over and over again. 

“Only got a couple left.” 

With enough layers of slimy plants off his face he could hear himself moan this time. The moan quickly shifted to a stronger cry when the vines tightened even more than they had before. They cinched into his flesh with the needles of its teeth, serrating his skin as they warped and contracted. 

“I’m almost there, Alec. I’m almost done.” 

The vines were crushing him now, no longer holding him but squeezing until his bones would finally snap and he was liquefied into nothing at all. He realized with a detached interest that it was a natural reaction of a predator being deprived of its hard won food. As Dean continued slashing and sawing through the vines, the dull explosion of the plant’s pain went off again and again in Alec’s brain like nauseating fireworks. 

He knew that this beast might not have had the frontal lobe capacity to recite poems, but the fucker definitely had enough wiring to strongly dislike having its appendages hacked off. 

Alec blinked when a sticky clump of leaves was peeled from his eyes. All he could see was a blur of the glowing cave above him, the gelatinous crap coating his face making it impossible to see anything at all. He gagged as the thing in his mouth was pulled and then yanked, trailing out of his throat limply like a tube of slick plastic. Rolling over onto his side, Dean pounded Alec’s back as he coughed and choked. 

His watering eyes focused on the man leaning over him. 

“I-I’m here to…” Alec rasped in a breath. “I came to…. to get you because you’re weak and you need help and…” 

“You were just in the nick of time too,“ Dean sat Alec up against a rock and checked his eyes one at a time. “Mind if I give you a thank you speech later?" 

Alec wheezed in another sweet lungful of beautiful air. Wiping his sleeves across his face, he watched his uncle climb over the rocks to another heap of writhing vines on the shore. Dean wiped his blade clean on his jeans before he picked a spot near what looked like to be the head on the vague outline of a human being. 

“S-Sam…it-it got him,” Alec tried to get up and failed. “Is he okay, is he-” 

“You sit tight, Alec,” Dean said. “I’ll be done in a sec.” 

“But-” 

“Just stay put and don’t go touching the water.” 

“O-Okay, but-” 

“Sammy?” With a horrible wet rip, Dean had removed the leaves off of Sam’s face. “I’m taking that thing out of your mouth now, all right?” 

Listening to his father gag, Alec spit again and kicked at the clump of severed vines laying limply all around him. The large cave looked just like it had when he’d walked into it. Quiet and thick with the decomposing smell of corpses down there in the murky water- 

“Dean I think some of those people…” Alec winced at the feel of his raw throat. “I think some of them are still alive.” 

“We’re leaving,” Dean said. “Tell me you can walk, Alec.” 

“Yes, sir.” Alec wasn’t actually sure but he thought he might be able to sprout wings and fly if it meant getting the hell out of here. “I-I can’t see real well though.” 

“I can see fine,” Dean whipped aside another wad of vine from Sam‘s legs. “You’re gonna be okay, Alec. I‘m gonna get us out of here.” 

Alec hadn’t realized he was more than slightly worried about that until his uncle told him he didn’t have to be. And he could see real quick that Dean was going to need help getting Sam to his feet. Coming to his father’s side, he saw that Sam looked about as interested in having a conversation about being blind sided by a mobile fungus as Alec was. So Alec just anchored an arm around his shoulder and started moving them as fast as he could towards the way they’d come. 

“No, not that way,” Dean motioned in the opposite direction with his flashlight. “I found another way out.” 

Alec nodded and wished he could see his uncle’s pupils in the dim wavering light. It would be nice to know if the guy was operating on all cylinders or was tripping hard enough on fungus acid to walk them all off a subterranean cliff. But Dean’s voice sounded solid, his movements were sure and careful as they hurried around the lake’s edge and towards the other side. 

“Dean, what about the other people?” Alec asked. 

“Keep moving.” 

A sudden blur of motion in the beam of Dean’s flashlight made Alec’s heart skip in his chest. If anyone else present was feeling anything like he was, being dosed by the plants was a lot like being drunk without all the cool fun parts. The rock walls shimmered, the glowing water churned like a vortex and every sound seemed to slither through the air like a living thing. 

Even blurs that happened to look like terrified little girls. 

Alec was ready to try to ignore it until Dean proved it wasn’t a hallucination by stopping and touching it. It really was a small girl with messy pig tails and she couldn’t have been any older than five years old. 

“You did good, honey,” Dean told her as he picked her up. “You hid real good.” 

“Who the hell is that?” Alec demanded. 

Dean glanced over his shoulder and gave Alec a ghost of a smile in the soft blue light. “She’s the reason I came down here. I followed her and her … well, I followed her and I found her before she got to the water. There are pools like this one all over. I got lost a few times but water always flows in one direction, right?” 

Alec thought of the happy family in the photo on that park bulletin and swallowed hard. “D-Dean, the people in the pools might not all be gone, I could still hear something. I could hear hearts beating-” 

“That was all that was left of them, Alec,” Sam said quietly from beside him. “It’s too late.” 

It was remarkable how bright the sunlight seemed after being down underground for so long. Holding up his arm against the glare of sundown, Alec realized they’d only been down there in the dark for a handful of hours. It had felt like a lot more time had passed than that. Losing track of time was not a sensation he experienced often and it made him feel even more nauseous and off-center than he already did. 

“Alec?” Sam asked. “You okay?” 

There were hundreds of the flowers withering around the hole of the cave. They weren’t as thick and robust anymore, the petals had become shrunken and dry. Even the fat stalks had weakened and had let the spoiled blooms lay across the ground to rot. The smell was even stronger somehow with all the fresh air. The decay cut through the sweet rot and made the colors in Alec’s eyes swirl tighter into focus. 

“Hey?” Sam’s hands were pressing into his shoulders. “We have to get going.” 

The gold and violet blending across the sky were a little too vibrant and vivid to be natural. Alec had a sudden and powerful urge to turn back towards the cold mouth of the cave and slip away while he still could. He could blur past their hands and touch that water again, feel the thrum of the creature living below the surface and drink its oblivion down like wine- 

A powerful open handed smack across the face brought Alec back down to earth real fast. 

“Thanks,” he rubbed at his jaw. 

“Don't mention it,” Sam let his hand linger on Alec’s face in apology. “And if you see me ready to start making daisy chains feel free to reciprocate.” 

“No problem.” 

Dean was already heading up the slope into the forest with the little girl’s arms clinging tightly around his neck. Sam pushed Alec ahead of him and twisted his grip into Alec’s belt. 

“I hope you’re toting a real lucky charm with you,” Alec muttered. “Because the odds of us getting out of here without becoming fungus chow are close to nil.” 

“Let’s just say it’d be a miracle,” Sam said. “And leave it at that.” 

Alec gave one last look at the blue flowers and decided to just start walking through the trees and not stop until he was told. Because if all they required was a bonafide miraculous event for this day to end with his family all alive, then he was willing to have some faith to help things along. 

Maybe he’d even say a prayer. 

They drove for an hour before they stopped. 

Sitting on the roadside picnic table with one of those pre-made gas station sandwiches felt like the closest to vacationing they’d come since the whole thing had started. Alec shared his baloney and cheese with the little girl named Ally. Alec told her A-Names were the best and four-letter A-Names were even cooler. It didn’t take much prodding after that to find out a phone number Dean could call along with the cops so she’d have some family waiting for her. 

Alec didn’t like how she kept saying she was going to meet back up with her parents. 

He didn’t like how she had no concept of loss whatsoever and how all of that was about to change in an abrupt and terrible 180 degree angle. His own family were all tinged a strange shade of blue but more or less okay. Looking at his hands, all Alec could see of his wounds looked like a bad rash. It hurt like hell but he’d walked away from a lot worse. 

And Dean was in the best shape of them all. 

“Why didn’t it get to you?” Alec asked. “I was built to let bio-weapons bounce offa me and that stupid fungus still screwed me up in the end.” 

“It got to me a little,” Dean said. “I just recognized it for what it was and didn‘t go huffin‘ the crap like everyone else was down at that water pump.” 

“Why didn’t you come get us first?” Alec tried to sound pissed off. “We could have gone with you.” 

“I knew you guys would catch up with me sooner or later.” 

“I still say you’re damn lucky.” 

“Maybe,“ Dean winked. “But maybe NOT swimming in the pool-o-death helped a little.” 

Yeah, Alec had to admit that walking into the water with a bunch of those things floating around in it was a pretty stupid move on his part. It was a lot like being a loud and tasty fly flailing on a spider web. The vibrations. The small tripwires. All these predatory species made it very easy on themselves to capture food without expending much energy of their own. But it made Alec feel a lot better that Sam had done the exact same stupid thing. 

He studied his father seated on the edge of the only other table at the rest stop. 

It was closest to the road, the zip of traffic blowing Sam’s jacket and hair around with the toss of falling leaves. And Alec knew suddenly right then and there that his father hadn’t unknowingly walked into anything at all. He had gone in after Alec and gotten himself stuck in there with all the other cocooned bodies. If it hadn’t been for Dean then they both would have- 

“So?” Dean sat down next to him and watched Ally pick wildflowers of the normal kind. “What does Manticore training tell you about solving this kind of problem?” 

“Well,“ Alec bit into his baloney and shrugged. “They were really big on burning shit to the ground. Kinda like you guys.” 

“Can’t argue with results, kid,” Dean said. “But I’m pretty sure we can’t burn a bunch of caves.” 

“Your dad’s journal said that the spores don’t live very long. They die out really fast but there was something big down there doing all the eating. I don’t think it’s going to be going anywhere else anytime soon either.” Alec paused. “So we cut off its food source?” 

“Bingo.” Dean pulled out his phone and made a face when he still couldn’t get a signal. “When we get a little further out we’ll make sure the All You Can Eat Buffet ends.” 

“How?” 

“Report a nasty virus,” Sam had walked up beside them. “It will keep people away from there for a long time. Maybe even years with all the reported disappearances.” 

“But…” Alec glanced back at the road. “It’s a public _park._ ” 

“Well, now it’ll be like nature intended it to be,” Dean said. “Empty.” 

The thought was strangely sad as it was pleasing. Alec wadded up his trash and tossed it in the garbage can and thought about all the gear they’d left behind at the camping site. Without ownership of tents and crappy sleeping bags it made the task of camping a hard one. Seeing a motel with running water in his near future, a smile came to his face before he could stop it from coming. 

Ally appeared and held up a small bouquet of flowers for him in a dirty fist. Yellow buttercups with the roots dangling. 

Alec’s smile faded as he took them and said thank you like he was supposed to. He really hoped his family weren’t planning on any more vacations in a really long time, but if they were he was voting for the cramped and disgusting crowds of a casino town. 

In fact, anywhere without any lovely scenery would be just fine with him. 


End file.
